Brown says it plans to support students during second year of FAFSA delays

Students seeking financial aid through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form will face a delayed timeline for the second year in a row. Traditionally, the FAFSA form opens on Oct. 1. This year, it will launch on Dec. 1. 

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Education faced multiple roadblocks while remodeling the form. That resulted in a delayed launch and numerous technical difficulties for students and their families.

Brown’s Office of Financial Aid is working with students who have persisting issues from the 2024-25 FAFSA and has already updated Brown’s financial aid deadlines for the 2025-26 academic year, Dean of Financial Aid Sean Ferns wrote in an email to The Herald. Current students will have until the tentative deadline of Feb. 1, 2025 to submit their requests for aid.

According to the National College Attainment Network — a group working to support first-generation and low-income applicants — the percentage of graduating high school seniors who completed the FAFSA dropped by around 9% for the class of 2024 compared to the class of 2023. 

“The delays also put increased pressure on financial aid offices, as the time they usually have to process FAFSAs and send out aid offers to students is shortened,” Megan Walter, a senior policy analyst for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said. That also means financial officers have less time to counsel students, which is “one of the most important aspects of their jobs,” Walter added. 

NASFAA is advising their “members in financial aid offices to stay flexible and continue to monitor the progress that the Department of Education makes this fall in regard to their projected timeline for the 25-26 FAFSA launch,” Walter said.

Any difficulties current students may have with the form “will not impact the potential aid they may be offered,” Ferns wrote.

Still, the delays may introduce uncertainty for prospective students.

Nick Lee ’26, the co-president of Students for Educational Equity, said in an interview with The Herald that he believes the new timeline will mean that “students will rush to determine where they can commit to, or worse, these students will be forced to commit without an understanding of the cost associated with the university.” 

The new timeline could “discourage college applicants, driving down enrollment numbers for some schools,” Walter said.

According to Lee, the delays are “evidence that the university system is inherently more difficult for low-income and underserved students.”

Brown offers multiple financial aid calculators that can assist prospective applicants in determining their approximate cost of attendance.

These delays came with the Department of Education’s launch of a new FAFSA application. NASFAA previously told The Herald that “the new FAFSA should be easier and take less time to complete due to direct transfer of tax information from the IRS into the application.” But this feature, along with others, often did not function as intended.

In late September, members of the U.S. Government Accountability Office testified before Congress about what went wrong with the FAFSA rollout.

The Department of Education “identified more than 40 separate technical issues with the initial rollout,” the GAO reported, including glitches in reporting information and inaccurate assessments of a student’s eligibility for federal aid. 

Among these concerns was that the form reportedly deleted student information unprompted, parents who did not hold a Social Security number were unable to contribute to the application and students born in 2000 were unable to proceed past a certain section to submit their information.

The Department of Education has begun rolling out beta versions of the revised form in an effort to address any issues prior to the full launch.

Brown’s financial aid office “will be monitoring the progress and making adjustments to our deadline accordingly,” Ferns wrote.