Warner compares FAFSA follies to Obamacare website rollout
PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) — If you or your child have plans to attend college in the near future, you probably have a good idea of how headache-inducing the revamped FAFSA form has been.
Technical glitches and processing issues have left many prospective students worrying their school acceptance deadlines will come before they find out how much federal assistance they’ll be able to get.
In a call with reporters Thursday, Sen. Mark Warner (D) compared the new online FAFSA form, which has been in the works for four years, to the 2013 roll-out of the Affordable Care Act website. That site, Healthcare.gov, was plagued by crashes that prevented many people from signing up for health insurance when it initially launched.
Warner explained that the new form was created by a bill passed in 2020. The intentions behind it were to narrow the 100-question document down to just 13, and to make an additional 600,000 people eligible for Pell grants.
“The problem was — and you talk about shades of Obamacare — the rollout was delayed literally for months on end,” he said. “And then when it was rolled out, there were technical glitches. It begs the question [of] why the federal government can’t do big I.T. projects on-time, on-budget or roll them out efficiently. … We’ve seen this movie before.”
Warner met with a group of Virginia high school seniors Monday to discuss how they’re being affected. He said the issue is hitting first-generation students — which he was — the hardest.
“They were running into the problem where they may have been accepted at a few schools,” he said, “but didn’t have how much student assistance they were going to get. So how do they make a decision?”
Warner said he’d also met with Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who told him the processing times had been brought down from weeks to just one to three days.
“There’s still going to be some disruption,” he said. “There’s still going to be kids that probably will have to take a gap year because they didn’t have their other financial forms. I encouraged all the students to hang in there, still fill out these forms.
Warner said there will probably be elevated levels of student transfers in the years ahead, as the technical issues prevent many from being able to attend the school they prefer.
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