JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Today, federal investigators testified before lawmakers about why the U.S. Department of Education's FAFSA rollout earlier this year was such a disaster. Millions of students rely on the FAFSA to help pay for college. Among the investigators' findings, some students had to choose a college without knowing if they could afford it. Here's Melissa Emrey-Arras of the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MELISSA EMREY-ARRAS: Can you imagine? It's like buying a house but not knowing how much aid you're going to get and having to make a commitment right then and there.
SUMMERS: NPR's Cory Turner joins us now. Hey, Cory.
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
SUMMERS: Cory, you were watching this hearing. Tell us - what were the big highlights to you?
TURNER: Yeah, well, we've all heard the FAFSA problems - had glitches when it rolled out last winter. GAO investigators documented 55 different defects. That's what they called them. For example, applicants born in the year 2000 couldn't fill it out. It mysteriously blocked them. Student and parent signatures would disappear for no reason. And one of the biggest problems hit students with a parent or spouse who does not have a Social Security number. The new form forced many of them - not all - but many to verify their identities manually by emailing documents to the Ed Department. GAO found that 219,000 people ended up having to go through this really burdensome process.
SUMMERS: Wow. OK, that's a lot of people. So Cory, what did the GAO find out about the Department's ability to address the problems you're talking about as they came up?
TURNER: Yeah, so time and time again, the Department just seemed to wildly underestimate how much support students and families were going to need. So those 219,000 folks I mentioned without a Social Security number - the Department planned for only 3,500.
And it made the same mistake with its call center. The GAO found, during the first several months of the FAFSA rollout, nearly three-quarters of all calls for help went unanswered because the Department ended up getting more than twice as many calls as they thought they would.
Even the Department's communications via email were nonexistent or unhelpful. For example, all those poor folks I mentioned who were unlucky enough to have been born in the year 2000 - the Department never told them what was happening with this glitch. So some just kept trying and trying until the bug was fixed 69 days later.
SUMMERS: Wow. I mean, in a normal year, we would be getting the next FAFSA in about a week, but we already know that things are delayed again. Any sense whether the process is going to be better for families and college students than last year's was?
TURNER: Yeah, the Education Department released a report on Monday, trying to reassure people that they have learned from these mistakes. They have hired 700 more call-center workers. That's a start. They're also not releasing the form in October to give them time to do more testing.
But there was a really telling moment, Juana, during the testimony today, when the other GAO investigator - her name is Marisol Cruz Cain - was asked if she had confidence that the Department and its contractor could actually release a fully functional FAFSA this time around. Here's what she said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARISOL CRUZ CAIN: If they keep managing it the way they are, I don't have confidence that they'll be able to deliver the functionality.
TURNER: Now, again, the Department is working hard right now to convince folks it can do much better. And we'll see soon enough. It says it expects to release the next FAFSA to all students December 1.
SUMMERS: NPR's Cory Turner. Thank you.
TURNER: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF GHOSTFACE KILLAH AND BADBADNOTGOOD SONG, "FOOD")
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.