FAFSA website meltdown: How to avoid additional frustration with financial aid applications

Some colleges are extending the traditional May 1 deadline for students to accept offers. valentinrussanov via Getty Images by Dawn Medley, Drexel University When Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020, it was touted as making it easier for more families to access the government funding they need to send their children to college. But as recent events have shown, it actually made things more complicated, frustrating and confusing. While the new federal student aid form – known as the FAFSA – is much shorter and requires less manual entry of tax information, there were glitches and delays in rolling it out, as with many new websites. Initially, families could access the FAFSA only for a limited time during a “soft launch” period in December. Now the form is accessible to families for them to complete, but the data is not flowing out to schools and colleges. Applicants are also discovering another problem. Often, students and parents may need to consult other documents or each other as part of the application process, so they will pause their application to complete it later. However, after initially logging into the FAFSA website, many students and parents experienced difficulty when returning to...