Stress Testing the FAFSA

After the disastrous launch of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FASFA) last year, all eyes are on this fall’s rollout, watching under skeptically raised brows for signs of improvement or further frustration.

So far, families and community-based organizations who have filled out this year’s form say it’s going surprisingly well. The limited, phased-in rollout began on Oct. 1, and the department is using the opportunity in the lead-up to the official Dec. 1 launch to collect feedback and fix issues.

Jeremy Singer, the former College Board president appointed to oversee this year’s launch, traveled to Florida on Oct. 1 for the FAFSA testing kickoff event and then back to Virginia for an event the next day. He said it’s too early in the testing process to make any definitive claims about this year's form but that feedback so far has been positive, and they have yet to identify any “critical bugs” in the system.

In total, 680 students successfully submitted a FAFSA during phase one of testing. Phase two, during which the department will expand access to a few thousand more students and bring in more institutional partners, starts tomorrow.

“This first phase is really just to see if the pipes are working,” he said. “It’s gone better than we’d hoped.”

The Scholarship Fund of Alexandria, in Virginia, one of six nonprofits tapped to help the department find testers for the form, aided more than 100 students and their families in filling out the FAFSA at an event earlier this month at Alexandria City High School.

The event was closed to the media, but Jasmine Milone, the fund’s executive director, told Inside Higher Ed that the “vast majority” of attendees were able to fill out the form that day, and that the user experience was “infinitely better.”

“So many parents walked in the door with horror stories from last year,” she said, “so I was shocked at how positive the feedback was after the event.”

Milone, like the other FAFSA partners who spoke with Inside Higher Ed, applied to participate in the testing period because she wanted to be a part of improving the FAFSA process—potentially saving her organization, and hundreds of thousands of families, from the stress of last year’s error-riddled rollout.

“It was a really difficult process last year, so we were excited for the chance to be involved early,” Milone said. “Everyone is trying to learn from what went wrong.”

Chandra Scott, executive director of Alabama Possible, a college access nonprofit and another of the department’s phase-one testing partners, said she was heartened by improvements to the user experience in particular. Families made minimal errors even when they completed the forms without in-person guidance, she said, and average completion time was about 20 minutes.

“A lot of people expected this to be very messy, myself included,” she said. “But families are walking out happy … I’m still about 50 percent nervous for [the launch], but it’s given me some of the reassurance I was looking for.”

A Look Under the Hood

The organizations involved in the first round of testing serve a wide range of students, including many from families who had the most difficulty with the new form last year, from foster kids and incarcerated students to first-generation college applicants.

“We’ve been very strategic in that sense,” Singer said.

The Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara held its FAFSA testing event Oct. 3 at a high school in Santa Maria, California. Foundation president Melinda Cabrera said they work with many students who are undocumented or from mixed-status families, who were essentially blocked from filling out the form until this summer—and some of whom are still having issues. She hopes the testing period gives the department time to fix those issues before the Dec. 1 launch.

“There are still challenges with students not being able to get their FSA IDs, but fewer than last year,” Cabrera said. “We know there will likely continue to be issues, but we’re ready this time.”

Singer said some of those issues couldn’t be fixed outright this time around—the confusing wording of certain questions can’t be changed without an amendment to the federal law that mandated the new form, he said. But they’re experimenting with workarounds that he hopes will make the forms less confusing, and giving families more guidance when filling them out.

Courtesy of Alabama Possible

Students and families aren’t the only ones hoping for a positive sign before launch. Higher ed institutions are partnering with the department as well, taking the early FAFSA forms in for processing to test their systems and crossing their fingers that it goes smoother than last year.

George Mason University, one of those institutional partners, received forms filled out by students in Alexandria last week. David Burge, GMU’s vice president for enrollment management, told Inside Higher Ed that they’re eager to start processing, remembering the delays and errors that set back aid offers well into the spring last cycle.

“[Testing] could be the difference between being ready in early February or early April,” he said. “All of this depends on whether we find any large-scale issues during processing.”

But GMU can’t do anything with the forms, Burge said, until their software vendor, the popular Ellucian Banner, makes updates to handle them. He said that could take a few weeks, and until then he and his staff are holding their collective breath.

“The word of the month is uncertainty,” he said. “And keep in mind, financial aid offices hate uncertainty.”

Singer is aware of the lag in software vendors’ readiness and said the department took steps early to try to prepare them, reaching out to most of the system providers in August to help them stay up to date. He said he understands institutions’ apprehension but hopes the work the department has done ahead of time will prove them wrong this cycle.

“A lot of them still basically have PTSD from last year,” he said. “This year, there’s very little change in the [Institutional Student Information Records]. We’ve been telling them that for months and they still don’t believe it.”

If people aren't confident they can complete the FAFSA … they may just not even try.”

Jeremy Singer

Shoring Up Confidence

Singer said that while the main purpose of the testing period is to identify outstanding technical and usability issues, he also hopes it will bolster public trust in the FAFSA, which last year’s rollout decimated.

“If people aren’t confident they can complete the FAFSA because of last year, or think it will be so overly complicated and burdensome, they might just not even try,” he said. “We need to make sure people know it’s worth their time.”

Part of that effort includes improving communication between the FSA and the organizations that can help build that confidence, from colleges to community-based organizations. Whereas last year, most access advocates and institutions felt left almost completely in the dark, this year Singer is trying to be as transparent as possible.

“We heard loud and clear that this was a problem last year,” Singer said. “It helps that [the department] is on more solid footing now, too … things are much more predictable this year.”

Burge said that being involved in testing the form is itself a step in the right direction for institutions.

“Last year, we didn’t always feel like we were an active partner,” he said. “Now we're starting to rebuild trust.”

Cabrera, of the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara, said the department’s transparency this year has helped them make strides toward winning back the trust of even the most jaded communities. She remembered one parent who recounted her “awful and stressful process” filling out the form for another child last year as she prepared to tackle it again.

By the time she left the event, she was finished.

“She came up to me at the end and just let out a huge sigh of relief,” Cabrera said. “I think that embodied the sentiment from a lot of families and students. I know I felt it.”