The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, calamity of 2024 is being recognized and felt by students, families and schools. Without a collective will toward remedy and high-order national attention, this calamity will carry forward for several years.
Amidst unprecedented delays and a bungled rollout of the revised FAFSA process and form, it’s now time to turn our attention toward a pathway for reestablishing positive momentum and helping students immediately access and fill out the FAFSA.
The social contract which holds that our government will “first, do no harm” has been broken. Upcoming enrollment data will likely tell the story of what I call “education-access deaths,” which I believe will be suffered by 3 million to 7 million students in total. Other experts say we could see more than 2.8 million fewer FAFSAs submitted this year; and, in the number of first-year applicants alone, a decline of 30 percent from last year.
It appears that, because FAFSA worked so reliably for so long — even though it was a pain to fill out the form — senior political leadership at the Department of Education took it for granted that the 2024 FAFSA rollout would also work. Well, sadly, we all now know that it required more careful attention.
In order to reestablish trust in our country’s commitment to meeting the financial needs of students who seek college and postsecondary skills, we must now establish what I call a “New FAFSA Contract for America” that reaffirms our government’s duty to deliver student aid eligibility information and funding allowability promises.
This New FAFSA Contract would be clearly articulated in writing and signed by every high-level official at the Department of Education, leading with the secretary of education’s commitment and support. Every single person at the Office of Federal Student Aid should be required to acknowledge the New FAFSA Contract annually and also be required to submit a test FAFSA application each year.
Related: COLUMN: The FAFSA fiasco could roll back years of progress. It must be fixed immediately
In order to make a “down payment” on this New FAFSA Contract, and to mitigate to some degree the damage caused by the FAFSA calamity of 2024, I propose that the Department of Education immediately undertake an effort to make large “block grants” available to community colleges, Title IV eligible trade and vocational schools, HBCUs and tribal colleges and other defined minority-serving institutions that enroll less than 750 students per year. This would cover a significant number of schools that enroll the vast majority of Pell Grant-dependent students.
FAFSA Fiasco
This op-ed is part of a package of opinion pieces The Hechinger Report is running that focus on solutions to the new FAFSA’s troubled rollout.
Allocation of these block grant funds to individual students would be at the discretion of college financial aid officers and be considered as grants, not loan advances, intended for Pell-eligible students.
Starting June 1 of this year, our government must allocate no less than $150 million per year to nonprofit organizations to support sending out the message of why FAFSA is important and how to complete FAFSA applications — and to restore FAFSA’s brand reputation. The funds should be awarded based upon Department of Education competitively solicited cooperative agreement grants.
In addition to the FAFSA messaging grants described above, the government should provide every high school in America with a $25 incentive for each FAFSA successfully completed.
It should be noted that we have successfully increased FAFSA completion rates before. During my time at the Office of Federal Student Aid, we launched a “But First, FAFSA” digital communications campaign using Facebook and other channels. It proved to be very effective.
A relaunched “But First, FAFSA” campaign must be continuous and baked into future operating budgets, and not be an ad-hoc expenditure. Funding for this communications effort should be at the same level as that which was used to reestablish trust in President Barack Obama’s healthcare open enrollment after its initial failure in 2013.
Also, Undersecretary James Kvaal must immediately put out a call for experienced and willing federal financial aid professionals, past and current, to come forward; they must be welcomed and allowed to provide assistance with both fixing FAFSA and supporting communications regarding FAFSA.
President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona should establish a five-person nonpartisan board, comprised of experienced financial services and higher education business office executives, to provide oversight of the office of Federal Student Aid, or FSA, and reinforce its nonpolitical status and authority as a designated Performance-Based Organization. This board would make sure that FSA’s mission — enabling student financial aid — is honored along with the new FAFSA contract.
A highly experienced large-scale financial services systems and operations executive should replace the current chief operating officer. FSA is in the services business, and this should always be recognized and supported by its leadership as being front and center.
We must start now to take action to cause FAFSA to once again be operationally sound, trusted and appreciated. If we do not collectively commit, then that which cannot be calculated or even estimated is the degree of harm that will occur because students could not access needed funds that are governed by, and enabled only through, the FAFSA gateway.
A. Wayne Johnson is currently a candidate for the U.S. Congress in Georgia’s 2nd Congressional District and the former chief operating officer and chief strategy and transformation officer for the office of Federal Student Aid.
This story about the new FAFSA process and the FSA was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.
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