GAO Calls on ED to Rebuild Trust in the FAFSA Process
By Maria Carrasco, NASFAA Staff Reporter
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday testified before the House Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee on the rollout of the 2024-25 FAFSA, and issued findings from two of the agency’s investigative reports outlining several issues with the implementation of FAFSA simplification.
The hearing, held by Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), chair of the subcommittee, focused on the findings of two GAO reports that were also released on Tuesday. One report detailed how the 2024-25 FAFSA rollout affected students and how the Department of Education (ED) communicated with both students and colleges, while the other – a preliminary report that won’t be finalized until 2025 – focused on the leadership of the Federal Student Aid (FSA) system and the new FAFSA Processing System (FPS). The two reports made several recommendations ED could take to improve the FAFSA for the 2025-26 cycle.
“The FAFSA rollout was mired in delays, errors, and frustration for some of our most vulnerable students who lost their dreams of higher education,” Owens said in his opening remarks. “The impact of the Biden administration's failure on real lives has been devastating. … Unfortunately, it has been the low-income students who were hit the hardest.”
NASFAA has long documented the shifting deadlines and key events associated with the FAFSA rollout and is concerned over new findings from these recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports.
In response to GAO’s new reports and congressional testimony over the FAFSA rollout, NASFAA remains committed to working with the department to ensure that students and families have access to timely and accurate financial aid information.
“Today’s hearing further documents the issues surrounding the 2024-25 FAFSA and highlights continued concerns over the upcoming application cycle,” NASFAA’s Vice President of Public Policy and Federal Relations Karen McCarthy said. “Several GAO findings point to long-standing systemic challenges within the Office of Federal Student Aid that need focused attention and time to resolve. We urge the Department of Education to commit to this work.”
The hearing had two witnesses testify from GAO, Melissa Emrey-Arras, director of education, workforce, and income security issues, and Marisol Cruz Cain, director of information technology and cybersecurity team. Emrey-Arras in her opening testimony touched on findings of the first report on how the 2024-25 FAFSA rollout affected students and how ED communicated with institutions.
According to Emrey-Arras, due to several issues with the 2024-25 FAFSA – such as a delayed launch and technical issues and errors – over 432,000 fewer students completed the form compared to the 2023-24 FAFSA cycle, which is a 3% decrease. The majority of this decrease came from high school seniors and other first-time FAFSA applicants, who had a 9% decline in submissions.
Emrey-Arras added that declines in FAFSA submissions were particularly pronounced among lower-income students and families. Among independent students, the drop in FAFSA submissions was largest for students with incomes of $30,000 or less. Among dependent students, the drop in FAFSA submissions was largest for families with incomes between $30,000 and $48,000.
Students who did not complete a FAFSA this cycle could continue to miss out on financial aid they need to pursue college, Emrey-Arras said. To prevent this trend from worsening, GAO is recommending ED develop an outreach strategy to connect with students who did not submit a FAFSA and encourage them to apply during the upcoming 2025-26 cycle.
Another finding from GAO’s investigation was that during the first five months of FAFSA application cycle, between January and May 2024, ED’s call center received 5.4 million calls – however, only 1.4 million of those calls were answered, meaning nearly three quarters of calls to ED were left unanswered.
GAO said the calls from students and families were left unanswered due to understaffing since ED underestimated demand. Emrey-Arras said GAO recommends ED plans for sufficient staff to meet call demand during the 2025-26 FAFSA cycle.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) pointed out to Emrey-Arras that earlier this week, ED released a white paper noting that since January this year, there have been more than 700 new agents added to the FSA Information Center to handle projected call volumes for the December launch of the 2025-26 FAFA. However, Emrey-Arras noted that while the news is encouraging, that addition brings up the call center staffing to the level that it was for the prior 2023-24 cycle.
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said that financial aid administrators “bear the burden of the mistakes made by the Education Department.”
“When the department wasn't answering their phones the financial aid administrators at the colleges across the country were the ones having to talk to the parents and the students, but they are in the dark in terms of the answers that they can provide from the department because of their failures,” Good said.
In addition to fielding inquiries from applicants and families, ED used its call center as a method to provide translation services for other languages, since the FAFSA is only currently available in English and Spanish. According to GAO, ED provided confusing guidance on how families could get translation services. Therefore, callers likely struggled to request translation services, Emrey-Arras said. GAO is recommending ED improves its translation services by providing a clear path through the call center menu.
ED also did not provide any confirmation that it had received applications from about 34,000 students who applied using the paper FAFSA, and it did not notify these students directly that it was delaying processing their forms until at least August.
When it comes to how ED communicated with institutions around issues with the FAFSA, Emrey-Arras said ED “consistently failed to meet promised deadlines,” including with the delivery of Institutional Student Information Records (ISIRs). GAO recommend ED develop policies to communicate key FAFSA milestones to institutions in a timely and reliable manner.
“Students and their families deserve a FAFSA process that works,” Emrey-Arras said. “[The department] has an opportunity to learn from its recent struggles and make the financial aid process easier for everyone. However, [ED] needs to move quickly to address these issues and rebuild trust in the FAFSA process.”
Meanwhile, Cruz Cain focused her opening testimony on the second report concerning leadership at FSA throughout FAFSA simplification. She clarified that these are preliminary results and GAO wants to look further into the FPS, including what testing has been done since the launch, and what testing will be done as additional functionality is rolled out, including for the next FAFSA cycle. More results will become available sometime in 2025.
One finding, Cruz Cain said, was FSA did not test the initial system as a whole with actual end users (e.g., student and parent applicants, and colleges) prior to deploying the system to all users which led to several performance problems. After the initial deployment of the 2024-25 FAFSA, FSA identified 55 defects with the FPS. As of March 2024, 35 of those defects had been resolved, but 20 remained unresolved.
Further, Cruz Cain said FSA did not always follow its own guidance for defining and managing contractual requirements or testing the FPS, which made it harder to ensure that all the requirements were being fully addressed. FSA also did not conduct an independent review of the project's processes, products and risks throughout its life cycle, Cruz Cain said, which limited FSA's ability to identify and address costs and performance risks.
Cruz Cain said the key to these shortcomings is FSA's lack of “consistent and effective leadership.” She noted that the Chief Information Officers from both ED and FSA were not involved in governance and oversight activities for the FPS, which is “essential” for successful modernization.
“Because FSA did not effectively manage the project, the system was plagued with delays and defects,” Cruz Cain said. “It's critical for Education to expeditiously implement the six recommendations highlighted in my written statement. This will ensure that the system's issues do not repeat themselves in future releases.”
Owens asked Cruz Cain if FSA has finalized a plan to avoid these FAFSA issues with the rollout of the 2025-26 form. Cruz Cain said FSA has verbally given GAO promises that they're going to do better testing and have better plans to address system defects, but GAO has not seen any documents that involve what the test plans would look like if they plan on conducting any independent reviews.
Owens concluded the hearing by stating that Congress will hold ED accountable for the rollout of the FAFSA.
“I unfortunately, unlike my colleague, do not have faith in the Department of Education,” Owens said. “We have no accountability. We have to wonder, what do we need to change this? What kind of innovation do we bring to this department, that will make sure this never happens again?”
NASFAA will continue to follow the department’s communications surrounding the ‘beta’ testing periods for the 2025-26 FAFSA and encourage the department to provide timely guidance on the upcoming launch.
“We urge the department to keep the lines of communication open with the financial aid community so that we can plan appropriately, provide accurate assistance to students, and help troubleshoot issues as needed," McCarthy recently said. “There have been many systemic issues with the 2024-25 FAFSA, as noted in GAOs reports, with the December 1 launch date rapidly approaching we urge the department to ensure the form is fully tested and operational as soon as possible.”
Publication Date: 9/25/2024
Darren C | 9/26/2024 9:23:58 AM
This article is a perfect reflection of what can happen when the federal government takes over a large service that the entire country is dependent on. There is so much to cover here, but I’ll just focus on some of the most embarrassing and egregious points brought up.
It’s interesting to read about ways that ED was unprepared for or that something was “unexpected”. These challenges were so easily predictable, that someone would not have to be well versed in the education structure to see them coming.
In May 2024, ED’s call center received 5.4 million calls – however, only 1.4 million of those calls were answered, meaning nearly three quarters of calls to ED were left unanswered. It’s pretty unbelievable to think that millions of calls went unanswered. It would be great to know if those students left unanswered succeeded or struggled moving forward with their education. I’d argue that there is or has been no leadership at ED, as being understaffed for this kind of call volume is amateur hour kind of behavior. I personally would like to know who was fired over this clear oversight.
One of the recent pushes for ED has been to do everything to prioritize lower-income students and families, yet that seemed to fail as well. Ed saw declines in FAFSA submissions particularly pronounced among lower-income students and families and callers likely struggled to request translation services.
Lastly, it’s clear that ED “consistently failed to meet promised deadlines,” for both schools and students. The high number of last-minute changes over the past several years has created a deep sense of unreliability in ED.
In summary, ED failed to answer many of your calls, they failed to met expectations of assisting low-income and non-English speaking students and missed multiple deadlines for those forced to be reliant upon them. It feels like ED hasn’t done anything well lately.
David S | 9/25/2024 2:32:09 PM
I wish I could see this and have faith that the motivation behind Republicans requesting this report and hearing was to make financial aid work better and easier for those who need help the most, to improve access and affordability. But given their history of saying that fewer Americans should attend college and voting or advocating to cut, eliminate and/or privatize Title IV programs repeatedly, along with their clearly stated goal of abolishing the Department of Education, I don't think that's their endgame. I think that, given the chance, they will simply hold the FAFSA problems up as evidence that there should be no Department of Education and that the federal government should have no role in education.
Hold ED's feet to the fire? Sure. But for the right reasons...to help students.
Peter G | 9/25/2024 1:14:36 PM
I think the "leadership" line bears some unpacking. This article refers to FSA's leadership, but the Chronicle article implies ED leadership:
"“Key to these shortcomings,” she said, is the department’s “lack of consistent and effective leadership.”"
Ultimately the answer is probably both, but
1) we're not going to see any headway until there is more coherence, and if it's not clear where the leadership gap is, it's probably not going to improve, and
2) notably, Cordray was allowed to see out his contract to its inglorious end while taking his press tour, and Kvaal is still employed but not particularly visible leading.
James K | 9/25/2024 8:28:30 AM
Yes, they increased the agency staff; however, they are not adequately trained and often give erroneous answers or push the student/parent back to the school. More bodies in seats has not translated into better customer service.
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