Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - FAFSA rule changes that were meant to simplify the financial aid process for incoming college students are creating more problems than solutions for families.
"It's causing a lot of headaches and we're getting bombarded with calls."
Jeff Boron with Send Your Kids to College telling WBEN during an interview on Friday.
The Department of Education this week said it will give colleges and universities FAFSA data (federal financial aid) months later than normal,
which means that colleges won’t get student financial aid information until early March at the earliest.
"That's going to cause a hiccup in the award letter process to students," added Boron. "There's talk now of pushing back the traditional May 1st decision day to possibly June or July."
Students need the information to select the college that they're going to attend, because a large part of the decision is cost.
Boron said right now, there are over three million applications sitting in a queue, waiting to be transferred to colleges. There is nothing that students and families can do other than being patient.
"There's a lot of anxiety, primarily with incoming freshmen because they've applied to ten to fifteen schools and they have no idea what the financial picture is going to look like because they need that award letter."
Why the delay?
Boron said FAFSA never updated financial aid tables to accommodate inflation. By not doing that, it would have cost well over a billion dollars of financial aid lost to students. He said they pumped the brakes, did the fix and are in the process of recalculating all of the FAFSA information before they transmit it to colleges.
Boron has been a certified college planning specialist for decades. He said the Department of Education is not looking very good because of how long the rollout is taking.
"They've been working on it for three years. It was supposed to start in October of 2022. Then they pushed it back to October of '23. It was delayed again until January of this year. When they rolled it out it kept crashing."
Be patient, Boron advises. "It's going to be a long wait time for those financial aid award letters."