Hundreds of thousands of financial aid applications need to be fixed after latest calculation error
Source: AP
Updated 7:47 PM EDT, March 22, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Education Department said it has discovered a calculation error in hundreds of thousands of student financial aid applications sent to colleges this month and will need to reprocess them — a blunder that follows a series of others and threatens further delays to this year’s college applications.
A vendor working for the federal government incorrectly calculated a financial aid formula for more than 200,000 students, the department said Friday. The information was sent to colleges to help them prepare financial aid packages but now needs to be recalculated — even as the department works through a backlog of more than 4 million other financial aid applications.
A statement from the Education Department says the problem won’t affect 1.3 million applications that were processed correctly and distributed to colleges this month. Officials said they have fixed the error and it “will not affect future records.”
It’s unlikely that many students, if any, received financial aid offers based on the incorrect information since the department only began sending records in the last two weeks. Once colleges receive that information, it usually takes several weeks to assemble financial aid packages.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/fafsa-aid-college-admissions-miscalculation-delay-6edb28219068fd19428b786635f09282
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