Education Dept. starts sending financial aid data to colleges

WASHINGTON — After months of delays and technical hiccups, some colleges and universities have started to receive federal data they need to put together financial aid offers for incoming students, the Biden administration said Monday.

The Education Department says it sent a batch of student records to “a few dozen schools” on Sunday and is making final updates before expanding to more universities. The department did not say which schools received the first batch or how many student records were sent.

The delay has cut into the time schools usually have to assemble financial aid packages before the typical May 1 deadline for students to commit to a university. Many colleges have extended enrollment deadlines as they wait on the federal government, leaving families across the nation wondering how much financial help they will get with college tuition.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid overhaul delayed the form’s usual rollout from October to late December. The department then soft-launched the new version to address lingering bugs in the system, but many families reported difficulties accessing the form.

Congress ordered the update in 2020 to simplify the notoriously complex form and expand federal student aid to more low-income students. The new application reduces the number of questions from 108 to fewer than 50, and it uses a new and more generous formula to determine eligibility for federal student aid.

The delays have had cascading impacts across higher education. FAFSA information is used to award state and federal education grants, and schools use it to assemble financial aid packages for prospective students. In the meantime, families often have only a murky idea of how much they would need to pay, which can be a dealbreaker when choosing colleges.

Advocates fear the holdup will deter some students from pursuing higher education at all, especially those who were already on the fence.

Repeated delays have become a blemish for the Biden administration, which has blamed Congress for rejecting requests for more money to overhaul information systems and update the decades-old application process.