If no one in your family has applied for college recently, you may not be familiar with the unending mental torture of filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the FAFSA and usually spoken alongside a curse word or two.
Created by Congress in 1992, FAFSA is required for all federal financial aid applications including loans, grants and work-study. Roughly half of high school seniors fill it out every year. Several states even require students to fill it out to graduate from high school, since the mere act of completing the form has been linked to higher college enrollment rates, especially among lower-income families.
Despite financial aid’s importance to the future of our country’s young people, FAFSA has long been a byzantine nightmare, like filling out your taxes but with your child’s future at stake instead of just an IRS audit. This year, a long-running effort to simplify and reform the FAFSA somehow made things even worse.
First, a significant overhaul of the FAFSA application website was delayed from October to December, as the Department of Education acted like a student who turns in a midterm essay at the end of the semester, hoping for partial credit. Then, the “soft launch” of the new site wasn’t much better, with students only able to get online for a few hours each day and many reporting that their saved information was lost.
This week, the Department of Education acknowledged it had also sent incorrect tax data to many colleges due to a flaw in the new form’s design. Though the department promised to send the correct data eventually, it advised administrators to use their “professional judgment to decide on a case-by-case basis” whether to process a student’s financial aid application until they could get revised information. The errors could lead some colleges to delay notifying students of their aid packages, complicating seniors’ already tricky decisions this spring in choosing where to enroll.
The “simplified” FAFSA form is the most significant government website debacle since the Obamacare health insurance exchanges.
In short, the “simplified” FAFSA form is the most significant government website debacle since the Obamacare health insurance exchanges infamously sputtered out in 2013. And like that measure, it could rebound badly on President Joe Biden, who has used forgiveness of student debt to try to woo young voters he needs to win re-election.
The Obamacare fiasco led to much soul-searching among Democrats, who realized that their dreams of using the government to help people could be undone by a few lines of bad code. (Or, in some cases, many, many lines of bad code.) The Obama administration hired an engineer from Google to redesign the site and created the U.S. Digital Service, a sort-of federal Geek Squad that works to simplify the government’s online services and advises federal agencies on web design.
You can see the influence of this new approach in the IRS’ new pilot program to let people file their federal income taxes online for free.
Rather than go big with a website designed to serve the 161 million individual tax returns filed each year, the IRS started a pilot program called Direct File, which is only available in 12 states for now. The program is designed for only the most straightforward tax situations, booting anyone who runs their own business or has even a slightly unusual deduction to account for. It was also launched with little fanfare well into the tax-filing season. These choices helped keep the program small and manageable while developers learn what worked and what didn’t. Bugs can be fixed, and features can be added incrementally, a popular software design process called iterative development. Eventually, over many versions, the software will have all the bells and whistles taxpayers might want and be able to handle even the most unusual scenarios. Ironically, members of Congress seemed to understand the need to keep things simple when they passed the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020, which led to the form’s overhaul. As a result of that law, the form’s 108 questions were distilled down to just 36, and the new form was designed to import some tax records automatically. Once the kinks in the new FAFSA website are worked out, these and other changes will almost certainly boost the number of students who fill out the form each year, in turn getting more of the nation’s high schoolers into the college pipeline. But that’s cold comfort for the Class of 2024, who are being made to pay for the mistakes of a flawed website design process.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
