Frustrated College Aid Applicants, Take Heart: FAFSA Site Should Be Open All Day Thursday and Friday

There’s some promising news for families frustrated by this week’s messy debut of the federal government’s new college aid application.

The updated version of the online FAFSA application — accessible for only about 30 minutes a day when a soft launch started over the New Year’s weekend — has been open for increasingly longer periods and will be live all day Thursday and Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern Time, the Education Department said Wednesday. 

“A soft launch is a standard way of rolling out popular online tools and products,” a department spokesperson told The Messenger in an email. “It means ramping up availability and volumes gradually to avoid spikes and to allow the team to adjust the technology to real world conditions.” 

A long-awaited overhaul of the FAFSA form, used by more than 17 million college students every year, is proving tricky for families with college-bound kids. The Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office pledged to have the 2024-2025 application open by Dec. 31 — already three months later than normal — but over the weekend, applicants were told that it would only be accessible intermittently while the FSA office continued to make tweaks.

According to complaints on social media, many tried unsuccessfully to complete the application for hours or even days but were either shut out or kicked out midway through.

“This is not a soft launch in my opinion this is a failure to launch!!!!” one user wrote early Tuesday morning on the Facebook page of the Federal Student Aid office.

As of 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, 225,000 applications had successfully been submitted since the launch, including 150,000 Tuesday, according to the department spokesperson.

The soft launch will continue until issues “uncovered through real-world user experience” are resolved, the spokesperson said in the email, noting that pauses allow the FSA to resolve glitches before more people encounter them. On Thursday, the FSA's website added an "issue alerts page" in order to list specific issues applicants are encountering as well as workarounds.

A soft launch approach is especially pertinent when a new website is required “to provide permutations for many different peoples’ situations and includes updating dozens of systems, some of which have not been updated in almost 50 years,” the spokesperson said.

The intermittent outages have been particularly frustrating because families already felt behind schedule on the stressful task. Not being able to apply for financial aid on the typical Oct. 1 date has made it harder to deal with individual college deadlines and tougher to determine which schools they can afford, online posts indicated. 

The FSA office is telling applicants who try to access the form during a “planned pause” to check back later and not feel rushed. Eligibility information won’t be sent to the colleges that applicants are considering until late January.

The FAFSA, which stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, determines eligibility for all federal financial aid, including grants, loans and work-study programs. Each year, millions of students who file a FAFSA get more than $120 billion in federal aid, according to the College Board. It’s also used by many colleges and state governments that offer their own aid. 

The new version, the most ambitious and significant revision since the 1980s, simplifies the application process and changes how eligibility for aid is calculated.

This story has been updated to include that an 'issue alerts page' was added to the FSA website Thursday.