The Leader’s Floor Lookout: Friday, November 15, 2024

FAFSA, or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, aims to increase accessibility and affordability of postsecondary education for students across the country who wish to continue their studies. These students must complete the FAFSA in order to access federal student aid programs like Pell grants and federal student loans. Additionally, some private and state programs also request FAFSA information for grant eligibility assessments. 

The FAFSA is supposed to be available to students on October 1st of each year, however it is not required to be available until January 1st, according to the Higher Education Act. Typically, the Education Department has released the FAFSA application on October 1st, giving students, their families, and schools, time to prepare and plan. 

In 2020, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act to streamline and simplify the FAFSA process, and in 2021, Congress extended the deadline for implementation of the new FAFSA with the understanding that the Education Department would release it in October 2023 – that, however, was not the case. 

Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the Education Department missed the October 1st deadline and delayed the form’s release for months, leaving families and schools confused. When the application was finally released on December 31st – one day before the January 1st deadline – it was a “soft-launch” full of errors and glitches with parts of the form unavailable, and students unable to submit or correct errors. Furthermore, after completion, processing was also delayed for months and contained calculation errors. Now, the Education Department says the FAFSA application release will be delayed for the second year in a row.

It’s not fair to hardworking students and their families or the schools looking to plan for the academic year for the Education Department to continue to delay, confuse, and complicate the FAFSA process – almost always to the detriment of interested students. By making this process more difficult for hardworking students, the Education Department is destroying the purpose of FAFSA.

H.R. 8932, the FAFSA Deadline Act, introduced by Rep. Erin Houchin, removes the flexibility in the deadline for the Education Department to release FAFSA applications by making October 1st the hard deadline for release and ends the confusion for students, families, and schools.

FAFSA is meant to make postsecondary education more accessible, not more complicated. House Republicans are fighting to ensure FAFSA’s implementation lives up to its purpose.