It’s been a busy holiday season culminating with the availability of the new FAFSA. Let’s just say it’s been anything but seamless for parents and students.
Monitoring Facebook groups, I’ve noticed so many frustrations with the new form. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s new and everyone is not too sure about the simplified format, or the instructions just aren’t clear, which is a distinct possibility. Whatever the case, the questions online are prolific.
My best advice: take it slowly. Read every section carefully and if you don’t understand, search for answers at StudentAid.gov.
From NerdWallet, here are its five most-confusing aspects, and strategies to deal with them — so you can submit your form ASAP.
1. Persistent technical glitches
Technical glitches on the FAFSA can be frustrating. For example, some users report getting repeatedly logged out before they can finish their form. If you encounter issues like this, it’s OK to take a break and come back to the form a bit later.
“There is not a huge rush on filling it out today versus tomorrow,” says Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “So it is possible to come back in a few days, and hopefully, some of these glitches will be worked out by that point in time.”
Other glitches remain baked into the form. For example, some school names are getting cut off on the FAFSA. This can be confusing if a school you’d like to send your FAFSA to has multiple campuses. If this happens, students can do an internet search for a school’s Federal School Code, and use that number to pull it up in the FAFSA.
The situation is evolving day by day. The latest list of known FAFSA glitches and workarounds is available on StudentAid.gov.
2. You can’t correct submitted answers until late January
If you submitted your portion of the FAFSA but realized you made an error, you may have to wait a few weeks until you can fix it.
Students will receive an email with their FAFSA Submission Summary — which details submitted answers, Pell Grant eligibility and their Student Aid Index — once the Department of Education processes their completed form, which is slated to start in late January. Then, you can make any necessary corrections to your submitted answers.
Even if you make a correction later on, it won’t change the submission time stamp on your FAFSA, McCarthy says. This could be important for students applying for financial aid that is first come, first served or that has an early application deadline.
“If a correction is made on January 30, that application date is not updated to January 30. It still records when the FAFSA was initially filed,” McCarthy says.
3. Invitation process for contributors
This year, students and parents fill out and submit their relevant portion of the FAFSA separately. Either the student starts and completes their portion of the FAFSA and “invites” the parent, or a parent can start and complete their section, then they invite the student.
That’s different from past years, when a dependent student and their parents had to sit down together and fill out a single form.
“It’s a role-based process, where it was not before,” says Jodi Vanden Berge, director of college planning and outreach at EducationQuest, a Nebraska-based college access nonprofit.
Though the new FAFSA is generally more straightforward than in years past, borrowers have reported that several questions are confusing or unclear. Here are two to watch out for:
4. Free lunch question
Under the federal benefits question — At any time during 2022 or 2023, did the student or anyone in their family receive benefits from any of the following federal programs? — “free or reduced-price school lunch” is an option.
This has proved confusing, since some school districts introduced free and reduced lunch programs for all students, regardless of their family’s financial situation, during the pandemic.
If a student received free or reduced lunch, regardless of the circumstances, they should indicate that on the FAFSA, says Vanden Berge.
5. Dependency question
Some students have reported confusion about this new question used to establish dependency: Are the student’s parents unwilling to provide their information, but the student doesn’t have an unusual circumstance that prevents them from contacting or obtaining their parents’ information?
If a student selects “yes” — that they don’t want to provide parent information — then, the parent can’t fill out their section of the FAFSA, Vanden Berge says. This would disqualify a student from most federal financial aid, apart from direct unsubsidized loans, meaning they can’t access grants, work-study or subsidized loans, which don’t accrue interest while they’re in school.
If you do make a mistake, remember that you can request a correction once your form is processed which will likely be at the end of the month.