Texas A&M University extends offer acceptance deadline amid FAFSA processing delays

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY, Texas (KBTX) – Earlier this week, KBTX reported on how FAFSA delays impacted a Bryan Collegiate High School student depending on financial aid to make her college decision.

Schools across the nation are adjusting their offer acceptance deadline to accommodate those delays, including Texas A&M University. Future Aggies planning to study at the main campus now have until June 1 to commit.

“It just became apparent that with the challenges that we were facing with data we received or not received that we needed to be able to give our students and parents more time,” Delisa Falks, Assistant Vice President of Scholarships and Financial Aid, said.

National College Decision Day falls on May 1.

Colleges and universities rely on FAFSA data to create financial aid packages for accepted students. However, delays in the application’s rollout, coupled with a high volume of errors within the application mean schools are unable to make accurate offers, and students don’t know how much they could have to pay.

Texas A&M officials said they only recently began receiving updated information and expect the first round of estimated aid offer letters to go out in a few weeks.

”We are still going to put within the offer letters that this offer is estimated based on the data we have at the time because we don’t know if there’s some other issues that have not been discovered yet,” she said.

The confusion and frustration surrounding the updated and delayed FAFSA attracted congressional attention. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) testified in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week.

That testimony gave a behind-the-scenes look into what schools like Texas A&M face as they navigate this delay.

“40% of the FAFSA files that schools have are not usable to calculate financial aid offers for students, and that’s on average,” CEO Justin Draeger said.

The updated FASFA form was a bipartisan congressional mandate meant to make the form more intuitive. Only about 36 questions are required instead of the 118 candidates used to answer, but some applicants answer as few as 18.

But website crashes, timeline delays, and errors in student data mean Texas A&M has yet to send out those aid offers.

“You can’t make them accurate without the accurate data. So part of this is waiting on the records to be reprocessed,” Falks said.

It’s left financial aid offices in a race to decision day, and concerned that more errors will come up.

“Schools don’t trust that more errors won’t be found tomorrow, that the data that they have today is credible,” Draeger said.

In the meantime, Falks said she’s doing what she can to keep families informed, hoping there aren’t any more issues moving forward.