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The Department of Education admitted on Friday that an incorrect calculation led to inaccurate aid estimates for a significant portion of student aid forms processed in recent months.
According to an official announcement, the FAFSA Processing System (FPS) failed to include all necessary data fields for accurately calculating the Student Aid Index (SAI) for dependent students who reported assets. As a result, this omission caused inaccurate Institutional Student Information Records (ISIRs) for dependent students with assets submitted to institutions before March 21, 2024.
Around 200,000 out of the 1.5 million FAFSAs currently being processed were affected by this calculation error, requiring them to be reprocessed and resent to institutions. Meanwhile, colleges were advised to manually recalculate the SAIs of affected students to expedite the estimation of aid packages.
Colleges started receiving small batches of ISIRs last week, but the delivery pace, along with technical issues in the software designed to receive student aid data, hindered progress. This recent error could further complicate matters for institutions striving to provide accurate financial aid offers to students before May.
Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, criticized the department’s latest mistake as another avoidable error likely to cause further delays in processing for students.
This hiccup represents the most recent in a series of errors and delays that have plagued financial aid offices and disrupted college admissions schedules, prompting many institutions to extend their commitment deadlines. The department had previously committed several calculation errors during the rollout of the new form, including a failure to consider historical inflation and the introduction of a formulaic error that would have erroneously expanded PELL eligibility, a situation rectified by Congressional intervention.
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