On the menu today: May 1 is traditionally college-decision day, the date that applicants to college must decide which school they will attend. But across the country, hundreds of thousands of high-school seniors who have been accepted to colleges can’t decide, or make an informed decision, because they don’t really know whether they can afford to attend. The newly “overhauled” U.S. Department of Education system that administers financial aid and certain scholarships and grants is still dysfunctional. It’s one of the biggest and most far-reaching Biden administration screw-ups (among a wide-ranging plethora of options), and yet unless you know a promising but frustrated high-school senior, you’ve probably heard very little about this mess. Read on.
FAFSA Disaster
God help you if you have a high-school senior applying to colleges this year. Entirely separate from the flourishing antisemitism, extremism, and angry mobs on campus, the federal government has created another massive headache and obstacle for families by attempting to overhaul a key computer system that runs financial-aid programs and completely botching the task. This is Healthcare.gov all over again.
The system is called the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and it manages Pell Grants, federal direct subsidized loans, federal direct unsubsidized loans, and the federal work-study program. Last year, almost 2.2 million high-school seniors completed a FAFSA application.
As of April 19, only 1.3 million high schoolers have submitted an application this year, considerably lower than the 1.9 million who had done so at this time last year. The number of low-income students completing the FAFSA process is down 34.4 percent from last year. The best state, as of late April, was Indiana, where the number of completed applications was only 11.8 percent lower than last year. The worst is Alabama, where the number is down 37.3 percent.
Our Dan McLaughlin is a dad of one of those families, and he wrote of his family’s experience in late March:
Many colleges require the FAFSA before awarding other forms of need-based aid, and some require it to be filed even by people without need before they can qualify for scholarship aid. There’s a more detailed and onerous form, the CSS, operated by the College Board and required by some schools. Filling these out is like doing your taxes, only more so. Typically, the forms are available in October, and schools may set filing deadlines in the fall so that they can deliver financial-aid awards at or near the time they send out acceptances.
Not this year. The FAFSA wasn’t even fully available until January 8, after the Department of Education briefly flicked on the lights on the form on December 30 just so it could claim that it launched in 2023. I was on two college visits over the weekend; one school said that it was just starting to receive the first batch of FAFSA need assessments for its accepted students, and the other had decided in the fall that this was going to be a disaster and pushed its date for students to commit to the school back from May 1 to June 1.
Regarding that December non-opening, Dan is correct; financial-aid expert and consultant Mark Kantrowitz told Inside Higher Education, “They had it open for 30 minutes on Dec. 30 so they could slide in under the deadline, but I basically heard, and all signs supported this, that they put it out unfinished.”
Preston Cooper wrote for NR about the emerging crisis at the end of March:
What went wrong? Democrats have been quick to blame Republicans in Congress for underfunding the Education Department. But congressional Republicans proposed a 20 percent increase in funding for student-aid administration, on the condition that the extra money not be used for President Biden’s various loan-cancellation schemes. Democrats and the White House rejected that offer.
Moreover, all indications suggest the critical resource in short supply was not money, but the attention of senior staff. An Inside Higher Education investigation, drawing on sources familiar with the FAFSA changes, found that the department “underestimated the work involved in the FAFSA overhaul from the get-go and viewed the project primarily as a system issue — one that wasn’t as high-profile as their other ambitious plans.”
The spin from the likes of Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Ron Wyden of Oregon is that this is all the fault of the contractor, General Dynamics Information Technology. GDIT was awarded $121.8 million back in 2022 to “build a cloud-based award eligibility determination system to replace the legacy mainframe system that is currently being used by the FSA program.”
But the contractors reportedly warned the Department of Education that the deadlines were unrealistic, and the job was more complicated and difficult than initially expected. The Washington Post reported in March:
To build out the new processing system, the Education Department tapped General Dynamics Information Technology, Accenture Federal Services, Peraton Enterprise Solutions and Jazz Solutions. When the vendors flagged problems in developing the system or missed deadlines, student aid staff said they felt like it was sometimes difficult to get political leadership to pay attention.
In August 2022, President Biden unveiled a plan to forgive up to $20,000 per recipient in federal student loans. The White House that fall pressed the student aid office to deliver a flawless process, according to three people familiar with the matter. That meant peeling off a few people from other projects, including the new FAFSA. [Emphasis added.]
In other words, the FAFSA overhaul was a second-tier priority compared to Biden’s student-loan-debt forgiveness — you know, the one that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled exceeded the president’s authority under the Constitution. Again, don’t take it from me, take it from the New York Times:
By the end of last year, however, the Biden administration’s student debt plans were struck down by the Supreme Court and warning signs were flashing that the Education Department had let other priorities slip, namely the launch of the new FAFSA form.”
Even if GDIT completely fumbled the ball, whose job is it to oversee those federal contractors? Who made the decision to go ahead with an unfinished system? Where does the buck stop?
Now, I know this is going to shock you, but it turns out that Joe Biden picked a garden-variety Democratic hack with no relevant experience to run the federal student-loan system, and go figure, that choice didn’t turn out well:
In what some sources said was an early sign of the administration’s priorities, Biden appointed Rich Cordray — a former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with no experience in administering federal student aid — as head of Federal Student Aid in May 2021.
When Cordray was nominated, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona boasted:
Cordray has a strong track record as a dedicated public servant who can tackle big challenges and get results. I am confident that under his leadership, Federal Student Aid will provide the kind of service that our students, families, and schools deserve.
The kind of service they deserve, huh? Apparently, Cardona hates America’s students, families, and schools. Cordray resigned this week, but Cardona continued to insist everything had been hunky-dory on Cordray’s watch:
We are grateful for Rich Cordray’s three years of service, in which he accomplished more transformational changes to the student aid system than any of his predecessors. He undertook the work of fixing the broken student loan system programs like Public Service Loan Forgiveness and Income Driven Repayment, identifying 4 million borrowers who were eligible for loan forgiveness. He oversaw the development and implementation of the SAVE Plan, the most affordable way to repay your loans ever. He revitalized the FSA Enforcement Unit to hold schools accountable for cheating students and combated student loan scams. It’s no exaggeration to say that Rich helped change millions of lives for the better.
Shut up. When you screw up on a scale this large, you shouldn’t get the traditional “great job” message from the boss on your way out the door.
In April, USA Today reported that even Department of Education staffers were fuming at the negligent, incommunicative management of the FAFSA overhaul:
Even some staffers at the Office of Federal Student Aid, the branch of the Education Department that administers the FAFSA, were miffed at their bosses’ handling of the rollout, two agency officials not authorized to speak publicly told USA TODAY.
For much of this year, if one or both of a student’s parents did not have a Social Security number, the system could not process the application. (About 19 million American children have one citizen parent and one noncitizen parent; about 14.2 million of these children are U.S. citizens.) But the Department of Education says that glitch has been fixed.
One of the reasons I want a smaller federal government is because I want a more focused federal government. A federal government that attempts to be all things to all people is one that is destined to trip over its own shoelaces, over and over again. When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Federal agencies should not be taking on sweeping new responsibilities and making grandiose promises when they can’t properly handle their existing duties.
Each year, roughly 2 million American high-school seniors who want to go to college depend upon the U.S. Department of Education to process the forms, so they know how much financial aid, grants, and scholarships they’re getting. A kid who’s accepted to more than one school may well decide to attend the institution that offers a more generous financial-aid package. Right now, hundreds of thousands of bright, promising teenagers don’t know what their options are. Good luck, kid.
The cliché “you had one job” doesn’t quite fit here, as the Education Department has multiple jobs, but running FAFSA is an awfully high priority. The federal bureaucrats failed.
And we know Cordray is probably going to go off and live well, working at some Democratic consulting firm, and he will never face serious consequences for the failure on his watch. Although maybe he won’t want to set foot on a college campus for a while. Introducing yourself as “I’m the guy who ran the FAFSA program in 2024” is probably going to be about as popular as introducing yourself as a proud supporter of Israel.
Remember, America, the adults are back in charge. We know this because the people in charge keep telling us they are adults.
ADDENDA: In case you missed it yesterday, in a small miracle, the U.S. has completed the construction of and is now operating a new nuclear-power plant in Georgia.
You may have noticed a recurring pattern, where the White House press office will assure us, in a written statement, that the president feels a certain way and has certain strong views. And then, a day or two later when he’s on camera and speaking off the cuff, the president has a message that is quite different. There are days where it feels more than fair to ask if President Biden is a trustworthy source on what the positions of the Biden administration are.
According to the White House press office, President Biden is appalled by the Columbia students who forcibly took over a building on campus. We’ll see if we ever get any on-camera statement from the president.