Another Insane FAFSA Change

Effective January 1 this year, having multiple students in college does not effect you expected financial contribution.

 It used to be if you had two and your EFC was $25,000 then that was split between the two students, increasing your eligibility for financial aid, work-study etc.

No more.   Now with the same income you're EFC is $25,000 per student so you need to come up with twice as much as the calculation used to require.

Yet another effort on the part of the Biden administration to grind down the Middle Class.

FAFSAing Around

The Freep is a master of understatement for the actual cause  of the woe expressed in the article: Significantly fewer students have completed the FAFSA while colleges try to manage fallout

About a quarter of Michigan's high school seniors have completed the federal FAFSA form, the ticket to receiving federal aid for higher education, compared with nearly 40% at this time in 2023, according to federal data.

The lagging completion numbers are partly due to a nearly three-month delay to roll out the new version of the form for students bound for higher education, according to Diann Cosme, director of MI Student Aid within the newly created Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential (MiLEAP).

The real reason is the new FAFSA fargin' website doesn't frickin' work.  The rollout, delayed as it has been simply is a website that DOES NOT WORK.

Shades of the Obamacare website rollout. This makes the Freep sad as it's the Democrats dropping the ball yet again so they clearly cant come out and state the obvious.

Quite simply the website makes it impossible to complete the form.

I get an email that I need to sign the app as a parent.

So I login.  The only actions are to either delete the form or edit it.

I do edit and it says you must review the entire page and go to the bottom to continue to sign it.

I go to bottom of the page.

 However at the bottom of the page there is only a button marked return, which returns you to the main screen.  It does not let you sign the FAFSA.

In short there is no way to sign the form.  The website does not work.

I swear, the Department of Education under Biden could mess up a wet dream.

Paper Doesn't Reset

Currently having the joy of doing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid FAFSA application for Abby for next year.

Back when I did it, it was paper.  Now it's online, for efficiency, of course, and as one expects, since it is created and managed by the bureaucracy, it's screwed up. 

It has already crashed twice now this morning.

From the beginning its rather slow, with having to hit continue multiple times to change and advance pages and often the continue button spins and when its done you're stuck sitting on the same page again and have to hit Continue yet again and by the third or fourth try it works.

First crash had a funny message that "Based on the information you provided we can't process your form" - this with less than a pittance of the form filled out and we hadn't even gotten to any good parts yet.

And it sent me back to the start page to reenter all the info.  So far had only put in the very basic biographical information -names, address, dob, SSN and drivers license number but it was a pain to do it all yet again. No way to save it as you go, nor any warnings that it wouldn't work again.

And it crashed yet again. this time at least with a friendly message that "The FAFSA form is currently unavailable. We are working to resolve this problem as quickly as possible."  and yep,, booted me back to the start screen of the FAFSA, which has no notice that it is down and you can have the joys of getting to try and start over hoping it might be working again.

Paper while slower to process at least didn't crash while you were trying to fill it out.

If you're going to require using an online system to do something, at least make it efficient and actually work.