Mikiah Roberson expected to receive her federal $6,700 student loan disbursement sometime between May 27 and June 3, just in time to make her rent and car payments. Instead, June 3 came and went. Days, weeks and finally over a month passed.
Roberson, a graduate student in University of Maryland Global Campus’s digital forensics and cyber investigation program, said the stress only compounded as her eight-week summer semester continued without any of her expected financial aid. As a disabled veteran, Roberson’s tuition is covered, but she relies on federal student loans to pay for living expenses while in school.
“It had a major impact on my mental and emotional health,” Roberson said,as she struggled to get clear answers on when or if she might receive the money. “Just constantly stressing out whether an eviction notice would be coming, if my lights would be turned off, if my car would be repossessed.”
Federal student loan disbursements for many students, like Roberson, were delayed over the summer session after new federal rules kicked in on July 1 that required major updates to the systems colleges use to administer aid. While no one is tracking the full scale of the problem, experts are worried about whether delays will persist into the fall semester that is underway. That could have severe impacts for the nearly 60 percent of students who already experience some form of housing or food insecurity.
When loan money gets held up, students have no recourse against either their school or the federal government. Instead they must find ways to temporarily cover personal budget gaps of thousands of dollars — at a time when the cost of housing and other basic needs are rising rapidly.
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Delayed student loan disbursements are “incredibly significant in terms of whether a student is able to remain enrolled and remain housed and cover their own basic needs,” said Aissa Canchola Bañez, policy director at Protect Borrowers, a nonprofit that advocates for student loan borrowers. “Everything is more expensive, and so that just makes financial aid and the loans that these students are eligible for and entitled to even more consequential.”
Experts, advocates and financial aid administrators place the blame on atypical planning from Congress when it passed the One Big Beautiful Beautiful Bill Act. The legislation didn’t give the Department of Education enough time to issue full guidance on new student loan regulations, leaving many colleges struggling to adapt. In some cases they are waiting on third-party software vendors to make needed changes or are calculating and administrating aid by hand.
Ellen Keast, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, said in an email that the department worked within the deadlines set by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which required the changes to take effect on July 1, 2026.
“Congress gave the Department less than a year to implement these changes,” Keast said.
She noted that the agency released the final rules in May, which she said provided “time for schools to prepare.”
Tim Walberg, chairman of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, said in an emailed statement that the legislation significantly overhauled a “broken system” and praised the work the Department of Education had done.
“Delaying needed reforms would have negative consequences for students and taxpayers,” he said.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025, includes a number of provisions that reshape federal student loans, including a new lifetime borrowing limit and lowered limits on outstanding aggregate debt for graduate students. The bill also placed new limits on Parent PLUS loans and eliminated the Graduate PLUS loan program. Another provision, starting the 2026-27 school year, requires schools to prorate loan amounts based on how many credits a student is taking. Altogether, the changes are expected to impact a significant number of the roughly 13 million students annually who rely on federal financial aid.
When students don’t receive their money on time, the delays set off an avalanche of financial problems.
One student in National University’s graduate program in marriage and family therapy told The Hechinger Report she expected a $5,000 disbursement sometime around June 1. The student (whose name is being withheld out of concern of retaliation from her university) relies on these disbursements every three months to cover two months of rent, as she slowly saves up to pay the third month’s rent through her part-time job as a nanny.
“I had to reach out to family members and get help, and that was also really stressful for them because I was hoping to be able to pay them back with my refund, and nobody knew when the refund was coming,” she said. “And so that just kind of created a cascade of tough situations.”
She didn’t receive her funds until mid-July. By that point, she’d paid rent late in both June and July, with a $100 late fee each time.
National University did not respond to requests for comment.
When it comes to disbursing financial aid, the relationship between the federal government and higher education institutions is complex. To help mitigate that, the Higher Education Act lays out a “master calendar,” which outlines formal dates and deadlines the Department of Education must follow.
Under the master calendar, the department has to start the rulemaking process a full year and a half before the academic school year starts. After negotiations, months of public comment and department review, a final rule needs to be issued in November of the preceding year. But because the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed in July 2025 with an effective date of July 1, the department couldn’t follow this timeline. And that gave colleges less time to adjust.
Colleges normally spend the months between November and the start of the next academic year understanding any new regulations, getting clarifying questions answered by the Department of Education, and making sure their software vendors have what they need to update their systems, according to Sarah Austin, a policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
“Just having enough time to get the information, make sure the software vendors have the information, make sure they can then reprogram everything, getting the specs that they need — all of that takes time,” Austin said. “What we’ve seen here is a condensed version of that.” As of August, some of the major software vendors used by colleges still weren’t caught up, she noted.
The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and over 40 other higher education organizations had previously called on the Department of Education to delay implementation until July 1, 2027, to allow the process to follow the normal timeline.
“That is not a minor inconvenience. It is a fundamental breakdown in the infrastructure that supports federal student aid delivery,” wrote Kenneth Ferreira, then-president of the Eastern Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, in an April op-ed.
Institutions also say that the federal government has been slow to roll out guidance and clarifications about some of these changes, and some details are still up in the air, said Austin. The Department of Education only released formal guidance on prorating loans for students who aren’t enrolled full-time, for instance, in early August, just a couple of weeks before classes began at many institutions.
Some of the guidance has also been conflicting, with differing information across some of the Department of Education’s written materials and webinars, according to the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. On August 20, a group of 16 Congressional Democrats sent a letter calling on the Department of Education to issue additional guidance clarifying how schools should prorate loans.
“We ended up seeing a lot of last-minute changes, and not enough guidance. And the reason why we have a master calendar provision is it is difficult for colleges to adapt to new regulations when there’s not enough time,” said Mark Kantrowitz, a student loan and financial aid expert.
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To Keast, though, the final rule should not have come as a surprise to any colleges. She noted that last November, the department reached consensus on the proposed rules, an early stage in the process.
“If institutions waited until the final rule was issued to start preparing, that was their decision,” Keast said. She also pointed to available published guidance, Q&As, webinars and other resources from the department.
This rift between the department and many of the major organizations representing colleges and financial aid administrators is trickling down to students like Roberson.
“There was a whole lot of passing the buck,” said Roberson on her attempts to get answers on what happened to her financial aid. University of Maryland Global Campus officials directed her to the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office. Employees there told her to contact her school.
“Nobody had answers for when the funds would be released,” said Roberson, who said she often received conflicting information.
In an emailed statement, Kaitlin O’Connor, Vice President of University Communications at University of Maryland Global Campus said the school has been working on the federally required processing changes.
“The university has continued processing and awarding aid, reviewing individual student cases and working closely with federal and higher education partners to ensure compliance with applicable requirements while supporting students throughout the process,” O’Connor wrote.
Roberson negotiated partial payments with her landlord and entered payment arrangements for other bills. But the wait stretched into its second month. “You’re telling them, ‘Hey, the money’s coming,’ but weeks are passing and nothing changes,” she said. “I kept pushing out the dates and saying next month I’ll be good, and then here we are at month two, and it’s like now things are getting very detrimental.”
Roberson continued, “You have to start to decide between do I pay a bill or do I get groceries? Do I get gas or do I get food?”
Meanwhile, the stress took a toll on her studies. “I knew that I didn’t want to fail, but it was very, very hard,” she said. “Me and a lot of my classmates were expressing to each other how difficult it is to focus on schoolwork when you have bills piling up and all these things you need to pay.”
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Experts predict the crunch will continue into the fall semester as schools try to catch up with the new rules.
Nick Prewett, executive director of financial aid and scholarship services at Stony Brook University and the current president of the Eastern Association of Financial Aid Administrators, said so far the delayed disbursement has mostly impacted the school’s medical students, who start in the summer.
But with fall semester underway at most schools, he said, “I think we’re going to see some delays in aid getting out to students. And I think you’re going to hear that kind of message across the country that students, particularly graduate students, are waiting,” said Prewett.
Prewett added that for students enrolled part-time, Stony Brook plans on waiting until the end of the add/drop period (a couple of weeks after school starts) to adjust student loans based on the number of units students end up with. “And I think that’s going to cause a little bit of confusion and maybe a little bit of panic on behalf of the student,” he said.
Roberson eventually received her summer disbursement in mid-July, about six weeks late into an 8-week summer program. She’s supposed to receive another $6,700 disbursement in early September, but she’s no longer counting on getting those funds on time. She’s taking on work as a delivery driver for Amazon — a challenge with her back pain from her disability.
“I’m nervous because I don’t know if we’re going to hit this situation again,” said Roberson. “It’s very nerve-racking just trying to prepare ahead of time for if an issue arises, which is unfair when you’re trying to focus on class.”
Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at butrymowicz@hechingerreport.org or on Signal: @sbutry.04.
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