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Colleges and universities are contending with a growing list of technical problems in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which determines a student’s eligibility for grants and loans to pay for school. The errors will probably require the Education Department to reprocess numerous applications, which could further delay when some students receive aid offers. Already, the agency has said it miscalculated about 200,000 records it had processed before March 21. Now, college leaders worry that is only the tip of the iceberg.
It is the latest snag in the tumultuous rollout of the new financial aid form, known as the FAFSA, that has upended the college admissions season.

America needs more plumbers, and Gen Z is answering the call. Long beset by a labor crunch, the skilled trades are newly appealing to the youngest cohort of American workers, many of whom are choosing to leave the college path. Rising pay and new technologies in fields from welding to machine tooling are giving trade professions a face-lift, helping them shed the image of being dirty, low-end work. Growing skepticism about the return on a college education, the cost of which has soared in recent decades, is adding to their shine. Enrollment in vocational training programs is surging as overall enrollment in community colleges and four-year institutions has fallen. 

Education Department officials said Friday they’d been made aware of potential issues with incorrect tax data on processed student aid forms, threatening once again to upend the troubled delivery of Institutional Student Information Records to colleges. The department later said that a joint investigation of the issues with the Internal Revenue Service found fewer than 20 percent of applications were affected by the errors.

The Education Department said Friday it will push back the reporting requirements for its new gainful employment and financial value transparency rule (FVT/GE) from July 31 to Oct. 1. Under the rule, colleges and universities will have to report new program-level information, including the total cost of attendance and the amount of private education loans disbursed to students. They’ve argued in letters to the department that it’s too much, too soon, largely because they need to focus on processing student aid applications and sending out award letters. Institutions have had less time this year than usual because of the fraught roll-out of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which has faced myriad delays and technical issues.

The rocky rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid has wreaked havoc on colleges’ admission timelines. They’ve done their best to adapt; when the department announced in January that it would not begin sending out processed student aid forms until mid-March, some institutions promptly pushed back their traditional May 1 commitment deadlines to give students and their financial aid offices more time.
Others held out hope that wouldn’t be necessary. But since the department began sending out Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs, last month, many more institutions have extended their deposit deadlines.