My December holiday had a rough start. I went to my usual bagel place on a weekday, in the middle of the morning, and walked right up to the counter—no line, no massive crowd. Without even turning around, the clerk who was in the throes of making a bagel sandwich said “We aren’t taking any new orders.”
How odd, I thought. The door was open, the lights were on, and there were clearly enough bagels in the baskets to feed an army. In addition, no “Sorry, but…” or “Can I buy you a coffee while you wait?” They just didn’t want my business.
This came to mind on December 31st, the alleged day of the much-anticipated rollout of the new FAFSA. I won’t hide my bias here. Many were pleased to see a reduced-form FAFSA, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the research I’d heard (and can’t find) that said 95% of all students currently qualifying for federal aid would also qualify by asking just two questions—how many people are in your household, and what’s the household’s income? Announcing the rollout would come in December, when the admissions world is used to November access, smelled like the college student who wants to know if sliding the paper under the professor’s door at midnight on the due date still counts as on time.
I really wanted to be wrong about this, but I really wasn’t. Yes, FAFSA was up on December 31st, thus making the December deadline. However, its arrival came with a disclaimer—this was a “soft opening” of the new FAFSA. My only other experience with a “soft opening” has been with Broadway shows and restaurants. Websites that aren’t ready use beta testing, where they create a model of the real thing, and offer it to a select few.
Not so with FAFSA. Since December 31, the site has been up, and down, and up, and down, and up, and – well, you get the idea—before an audience of millions. It’s been up long enough for some counselors to ask pointed questions about the new form and format. It’s also been down long enough for first-time users to try and log in several times without success, concluding they’d be better off getting college money by working at Subway this fall.
This effort does little to assuage the many, many, many detractors of the US Department of Education. Since its inception, ED has built a reputation for either offering no help at all with significant education issues (their handling of instruction during COVID is a recent example), or offering solutions so limited or convoluted that they were either unsuccessful, or served as a disincentive for those seeking assistance.
This soft opening met the letter of the law requiring a December debut, while leaving educators, parents and students drowning in a wake of frustration. Students whose parents went to college, or students of means, won’t suffer a bit as a result of this adventure; the families of first gens who need the cash, and the help, will.
If ED is looking for a way to atone, try this. Put a line item in your budget where every student who files a complete FAFSA gets a $200 gift card. They can use it for college, they can use it for prom—heck, they can use it at Subway. Doing so would send the message that ED is serious when it means filing a FAFSA leads to cash—and, unlike the bagel shop that’s lost my business for good, it may bring some students back into the college-is-possible fold.
Patrick, thanks for writing this. I'm wondering why I'm not hearing more calls for investigation into what exactly is going wrong at the Dept of Ed. I mean, College Board reprogrammed APs to be online in less than 3 months in 2020, Common App's motto is "we're here, 24/7." If they could give some minimal explanation, I think it would help so much: Are they short on programmers? Is the interface so antiquated that they're having trouble making changes? Was everything written in Fortran? They have high schoolers writing the code? Something, anything.
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