Colleges to Education Department: We don't have enough time to process FAFSA information

Two-thirds of colleges and universities polled in a new survey said they don’t believe they’ll be able to successfully process student financial aid data in the next few weeks. And fewer than half of them are adjusting their decision deadlines so far.

The concerns were detailed in a letter sent to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Thursday by the American Council on Education and a slew of other organizations representing colleges in Washington. 

They were just some of the striking things more than 350 colleges had to say when asked about how they’re responding to the repeated delays in this year’s rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. In the latest blunder just a week ago, the Education Department acknowledged it was miscalculating the data for hundreds of thousands of students – a mistake it blamed on an outside vendor and said has since been fixed.