Another “unforced error” in the FAFSA failure

The Department of Education acknowledged Friday that a calculation error led to inaccurate aid estimates for a large portion of student aid forms processed in the past few months.

“The FAFSA processing system (FPS) did not include all data fields necessary to correctly calculate the Student Aid Index for dependent students who reported assets,” administration officials wrote in an announcement. “This issue has resulted in inaccurate ISIRs being issued to dependent students whose assets have been surrendered [to institutions] Before March 21, 2024.”

Of the 1.5 million FAFSAs currently being processed, about 200,000 were affected by the miscalculation and will need to be reprocessed and forwarded to institutions, the department said. In the meantime, they recommended that colleges manually recalculate the SAIs of affected students in order to estimate aid packages sooner.

Colleges began receiving small batches of Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs, last week, but the pace of delivery — and technical issues with software designed to receive student aid data — has hampered progress. The latest error could further hamper institutions racing to get accurate financial aid offers to students before May.

Justin Dreger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, lamented the department’s recent miscalculations and called them “another inadvertent error that will likely cause further delays in student processing.”

“At this stage of the game, after so many delays, every mistake is piling up and will be keenly felt by every student who relies on need-based financial aid to pursue their post-secondary dreams,” he wrote in a statement. “It is not possible or realistic to submit incorrect data from the FAFSA and require thousands of schools to make real-time calculations and adjustments to the federal formula on the school side.”

This hiccup is the latest in a long line of errors and delays that have bedeviled financial aid offices and disrupted college admissions timelines, forcing many institutions to postpone their commitment deadlines. The department had previously made several accounting errors while rolling out the new model, including failing to account for historical inflation and introducing an error in the formula that would have mistakenly expanded PELL eligibility, which Congress stepped in to fix.