Subcommittee on Higher Education. The subcommittee will come to order. The chair is authorized to call recess at any time. Welcome to todays hearing entitled fafsa fail, examining impacts to students, family and schools. There comes a time for students across america to apply for college. The free application for federal student aid, fafsa, is a critical tool. For many, fafsa is the only access to Postsecondary Education and opens doors and provides Financial Assistance to individuals seeking to pursue academic conditions with regards to their background. In 2020 legislators and policymakers sought to make the process even more accessible by passing the fafsa simplification act. With the financial burden of colleges each year, it was incredibly important the form ease the fafsa for families. The new law streamlines the long and complex application process and in some cases the students could see the number of questions on the form shrink from 818 from 103 on the previous fafsa application. As weve learned over the past three years, the administrations greatest success is its failure at everything it tends to do. Today the committee paused for a familiar challenge oversight. Despite our efforts, the department of educations fafsa rollout was meyered in delays and dysfunction, without accountability, the department of educations botched application threatens to harm students, families and institutions. The fafsa simplification has been a federal law since the Biden Administration, day one. Yet that did not stop the department of education from pursuing five months for punting five months from the official launch date of july 2023 to a soft launch on december 2023. Five months. The department of education did not did roll out the new fafsa and students were met with sporadic glitches and queries with technical issues. Some students could not complete the format all. For those who managed to complete the form, the transition of key numbers to schools were slow. Without timely data, schools cannot forecast budgets or prepare Financial Aid packages. Compounding the issue, the department of education has made multiple data errors, rendering hundreds of thousands of records inaccurate and unusable for schools. Unfortunately, this may only be the tip of the iceberg. New errors are revealed every week and may be a new one by the time this hearing is over. The failures impact the taxpayers and institutions can be seen with a estimated 20 drop in enrollment this year. Low income students requiring access for aid will be the hardest hit and these delays dont account for next years fafsa which will almost certainly not be ready by october. Its unfathomable the office of federal student aid received over 2 billion last year. So in essence, the american taxpayer has paid 2 billion to give their children a year or two of chaos and anxiety. Fafsa was created in 1992 with the h. G. A. Reauthorization act. Weve had 32 years of a functioning system that served hundreds of millions of students and thousands of institutions. Within three years, the Biden Administration department of education has managed to bring the educational industry to a possible Game Changing crisis. So what is bidens answer to this debacle. Hes asked for an additional 625 million to add to the office of federal student aid budget. Were left to conclude instead of doing the job it was tasked to do which is helping over 18 Million Students or potential students apply for fafsa, this administration opted to waste months of time and energy on a reelection strategy, and unconstitutional student loan forgiveness scheme. Our answer to this, not a dollar more until we figure this out. Students, schools and institutions deserve answers. It is our responsibility as congress to held the executive branch accountable. I look forward to working together with members from this committee to learn from this rollout and ensure the smooth, clear, and honest fafsa process moving forward. I yield to the Ranking Member for her opening statement. Ms. Waters thank you for the witnesses to coming today. We know a College Degree is the most fastest way to economic mobility for america. Unfortunately, for many lowincome students, particularly those at hbcus such as Florida Memorial University in south florida where i live, the cost of a College Degree remains out of reach without federal student aid. Ms. Wilson for years the pell grants helped to be somebodys students achieve the promise of Higher Education. This is why in 2020, democrats and republicans in Congress Passed the fafsa simplification act which aimed to streamline the free application for federal student assistance form and expand student aid eligibility especially for those who usually would not be able to afford to go to college. Sadly, the holdup with this law raised questions about whether going to college in the fall is even doable for those who cant foot the bill. Students needed their Financial Aid information months ago to make College Decisions, yet many still dont have that information today. Id like to remind everyone that College Decision day should be a joyous event where students declare where theyll go in the fall and is may 1, less than a month away. And we dont want children all dressed up on that day with no place to go. I even have a signing day in my district where the boys and the 5,000 role models of excellence sign just like athletes, but they are signing for academic scholarships. But guess what . Many students wont even have what they need to make that choice. Additionally, this has made things more complicated for colleges and High School Counselors as well. They, just like students, have had to quickly adapt to the frequent changes from the department of education. These setbacks put decades of progress in jeopardy, slamming the breaks on efforts to widen access to Higher Education and Financial Stability for students of color, first generation students, and those from lowincome backgrounds. According to the National CollegeAttainment Network, only 32. 3 of students from lowincome high schools completed the fafsa form. 32. 9 decrease from the previous year. And only 32. 2 of students in high minority high schools have completed the form, but 33. 3 decrease from the previous year. This stark reality directly imposes the intended purpose of the simplification act serving as a slap in the face to students wanting to be somebody and achieve the promise of Higher Education. While i agree that holding the department accountable and investigate its mishandling is crucial, our immediate priority, immediate priority, must be ensuring students and their families have the necessary resources to make informed decisions about their future. We must also ensure that schools and organizations are prepared to assist them. The clock is ticking and students need answers now. Id like to request inclusion in the record, the tampa bay time, entitled floridas student aid request plunge, how many will delay or even skip college. And i want to note theres a graph showing federal student aid applications were lowest among floridas poorest students. No objection. Thank you. Pursuant to Committee Rules h. C. All who want to introduce written statements may do so submitting them to the clerk in microsoft word format by 5 00 p. M. , 14 days after this hearing, april 24, 2024. Without objection, the hearing world will remain open 14 days to allow statements and materials referenced during the hearing to be submitted to the official hearing record. Mr. Owens id like now to turn to introduce our four distinguished witnesses. First witness is mr. Mark cantowits who is president of cerebral institute, cerebral which is located sorry about that. Which is located in skokie, illinois. Our next witness is justin, the president and c. E. O. Of the National Student for Financial Aid administrators located in washington, d. C. Third witness is ms. Kim cook, c. E. O. Of National CollegeAttainment Network located in washington, d. C. Our final witness is Rachel Fieldman who is the vice provost for enrollment at university of North Carolina, chapel hill, located in chapel hill, North Carolina. Thank you so much. We thank the witnesses for being here today and for giving your testimony and pursuant to the rules, id like to ask you to limit your oral presentations, five minute summary of your written statement. Id like to remind the witnesses to be aware of their responsibility to provide Accurate Information to the subcommittee. Id like to start off with recognizing mr. Kantowitz. I thank you for convening the hearing on fafsa fail, examining the impact on students, families and schools, and for inviting me to testify before the u. S. House subcommittee on Higher Education and Work Force Development this morning. My name is mark kantrowitz. In 1996 i developed a prototype of an online fafsa that led to the fafsa being available on the web. Since then ive provided Public Comment on draft fafsas every year and wrote a bestselling book about the fafsa and served on several websites about Financial Aid. My mission it to provide practical information and tools to students and their families so they can make important decisions on planning and paying for college. I am pleased to have my opportunity to share my insights with the committee today. The rollout of the 20242025 fafsa have been plagued by delays, errors and communication failures. This has been a frustrating and impossible process for students, families, colleges, and scholarship providers. There have been numerous missed deadlines, long delays, broken promises and i. T. Errors and full call centers and a lack of transparency with the delays being portrayed in an overly optimistic fashion. The goal of fafsa simplification was to make it easier for students and their families to file the fafsa, thereby eliminating it as a barrier to College Success by low income students, First Generation College students, underrepresented students, and other at risk students. The launch of the new form has been a disaster in this regard. Lets review how we got here. Congress passed the fafsa simplification act on december 27, 2020, effective for the 20232024 award year. When the u. S. Department of education said they couldnt implement the simplified fafsa as scheduled, Congress Passed the fafsa simplification technical implications act in 2022 to delay implementation until 20242025. The contract for the simplified fafsa wasnt awarded until march of 2022, 15 months after passage of the fafsa simplification act. The u. S. Department of education didnt launch the fafsa until december 30 of 2023, three months after the usual october 1 start date. The fafsa was open for only half an hour that day. Problems prevented many students and families from filing the new fafsa. 15 of these problems remained unresolved. When students and families called the federal Student Aid Center for help, they spent hours on hold. Calls and email messages went unanswered. The u. S. Department of education didnt initially implement inflationary adjustments in the fafsa Financial Aid formulas as required by the fafsa simplification act, despite being told about this problem in may of 2023. They didnt decide to fix the problem until january 2024 after learning middle income students would lose an average of about 1,600 in Financial Aid and high income students an average of 4600. On january 30, 2024, the day colleges were supposed to start receiving processed facia data, the u. S. Department of education announced another unprecedented sixweek delay. When fafsa processing began in mid march of 2024, applicants werent able to make corrections yielding high error rates. There were also errors that affect about a 1 4 of all fafsas such as errors in dependent Student Access and errors in tax data. Applicants will have a few weeks to make the most momentous decision of their lives. There are 2. 8 million fewer fafsas filed this year as compared with the same time last year. A 15 drop overall. The drop in College Enrollment may be worse than during the pandemic causing some colleges to close. Several factors contributed to the fafsa fiasco. Rather than just remove questions to simplify the fafsa, the u. S. Department of education decided to change everywhere everywhere all at once including an overhaul of the antiquated fafsa infrastructure. At the same time there was the restart of repayment for federal Student Loans, proposals for student loan forgiveness, and the new save income driven repayment plan. There was inadequate testing of the new fafsa before launch. Testing was an afterthought, not part of the original development plan. More time, staffing, funding and testing and better prioritization of existing problems may have helped. I want you to thank for you taking an interest in the simplified fafsa and for inviting me to share my thoughts on the matter. Id be happy to answer any questions on this or other topics. Mr. Owens thank you, mr. Kantrowitz. I appreciate it. Thank you. Next witness is mr. Draeger. Mr. Draeger my name is Justin Draeger who represents 3,000 university and Career SchoolFinancial Aid offices and today ill give their perspective. I want to take us back in time a couple months to january 30, 2024. That day will live in the collective trauma of most Financial Aid offices across the country. That was the day that schools were expecting to receive roughly 3 million three million fafsa files from the u. S. Department of education. To be clear, to the students who had completed the fafsa up to that point, it was anything but smooth sailing. Theyd already gone through a form that was only available at certain times of the day and riddled with glitches, to put it mildly. By january 30th, that was the day the department had told schools theyd start to receive fafsa files and schools were already months behind at that point. They need those files so they can start to put together Financial Aid packages, things like pell grants and supplemental grants and needbased scholarships and state grants and workstudy. So you can understand they were very anxious on this day to get started. At that point in the process, schools had already started sending out Early Admissions. Schools were in the coming weeks going to start sending out regular admissions. By that point, students had already started receiving admissions decisions. What they didnt know and make they still dont know today is how theyre going to pay for it. So youll understand that on january 30, as they were anxiously waiting at their desks for those fafsa files they were aghast in what instead they received was a notice from the department of education that fafsa files would be delayed for another two months. Now, january 30th wasnt the first day of bad news. But it was the straw that broke the camels back and turned this rollout from a hardship into a crisis. January 30th, communication, that communication fits a pattern thats been repeated throughout this launch and negatively impacting every school, every student, and every family in your strict. And what is that pattern . Its a lastminute communication from the department of education throwing schools and students and families into chaos. Its drastic and farreaching policy decisions making everyone do 90degree turns if not 180degree directional changes. And its bad news buried in celebratory publicity. And thats usually stuff thats reserved for press releases and thats fine. I come from the world of p. R. And communications, but stuff thats usually in press releases has now made its way into operational releases. And this isnt just a petty list of grievances. This really adds up to a crisis of credibility for the department of education. And that brings me to today. My written testimony lays out with painstaking detail where we are. But i want to wrap up with really two points. Overhauling the fafsa was a big deal. It was a big operational lift. It was necessary and it was important, but maybe the thing i want to highlight most of all, it was congressionally mandated bipartisanly. And when Congress Gives any administration a legislative mandate, it should be the top priority of that administration. My second point is we are in an awful place today. Schools have all the fafsa information they need from the department of education. But the department estimates 20 of the files the schools have are riddled with errors. And another 20 of the files on top of that on average dont have the numbers the Financial Aid offices need to actually calculate any awards. That means 40 of the fafsa files that the schools have are not usable. To calculate Financial Aid packages for students. Thats on average. Some schools are higher. Heres the hard truth, and i