Exclusive: The Education Department says it will fix its $1.8 billion FAFSA mistake
Cory Turner
January 23, 2024
Families have a lot of questions right now about how much help they’ll get paying for college — questions that financial aid offices can’t yet answer.
That’s because this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is months behind schedule. And to make things really complicated, it includes a mistake that would have cost students $1.8 billion in federal student aid.
We covered the mistake in detail here. In a nutshell: The U.S. Education Department’s FAFSA math, for deciding how much aid a student should get, is wrong.
In practice, this mistake would make some students and families appear to have more income than they really do, and that means they would get less aid than they should. And not just federal financial aid but also all sorts of state and school-based aid.
