By MorraLee Keller, Senior Director, Strategic Programming
Reading time: Three minutes
The 2024-25 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is off to a rocky start. Early on, we have experienced limited availability of the form, waiting rooms, FSA ID account creation not working, and issues with the actual FAFSA form. We hope to
have turned the corner on availability. The Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) released last week a set of known issues that users are experiencing when attempting to complete the form. The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) recommends that you thoroughly review this article to understand things that your students and their contributors may experience. For
some issues, FSA has suggested some current workarounds but for others there is no solution until the system can be fixed.
Here is a brief summary of the issues that have workarounds:
If a student incorrectly selects “eligible noncitizen” and completes the demographic section, they will not be able to submit FAFSA after correcting their citizenship status.
Workaround: Delete current application and start a new one.
Parents who need to re-enter a saved FAFSA will need to add country again to submit.
Workaround: Answer country question again.
Student or parent who returns to signed and saved FAFSA that still requires contributors will find the FAFSA no longer has their signature.
Workaround: Re-sign the FAFSA
College names are truncated and difficult to distinguish between when colleges have multiple programs.
Workaround: Search by federal school code (can be found here).
Parent or spouse contributors without FSA IDs are prevented from creating accounts while Social Security Administration (SSA) match is pending.
Workaround: Delete mailing address on the Create an Account page or waiting until the SSA match is complete.
Perhaps more important are the issues for which there are currently no solutions. The student and contributor are being advised that nothing can be done until FSA gets the system fixed. Here is that list:
Students without SSNs that exit FAFSA form before “State of Legal Residency” question will be unable to continue or start new form.
Parent with no SSN is unable to start FAFSA form for student or contribute to an existing form, even if the students starts the application.
Parent with foreign legal residence is unable to submit FAFSA when they have not filed taxes due to earning no income.
FAFSA is unable to be submitted if parent contributor “Income Tax Paid” is greater than “AGI” when completing manual income/tax entry.
A married student or parent who does not provide spouse’s info before leaving the FAFSA will not be able to complete and submit after returning to the form.
It is our understanding that the best way to know if an issue has been resolved is to keep checking the alert announcement which has a “status” for each issue. The status for all of these knows issues is currently listed as ‘open” which we assume will
be updated when resolved.
While this is the official list from FSA, NCAN has received a large amount of feedback from members about other issues encountered when attempting to complete the form. NCAN continues to report these issues to FSA and is awaiting responses to share. If
you encounter issues when assisting students/families with FSA ID account creation or completing the FAFSA, please take screen shots whenever possible and send those to MorraLee Keller at kellerm@ncan.org along
with a description of what point you were at in the form or the FSA ID.
NCAN will continue to communicate to members as quickly as we can with known issues and solutions. Thank you in advance for all the assistance and support that you are providing to students.
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