Upset about FAFSA? Here's something you can do about it

How can 70,000 emails from students applying for aid fall through the cracks?

I haven't wanted to comment on the FAFSA debacle. Lord knows the public servants struggling with this have gotten plenty of grief, and are trying as hard as they can. It was the same with the unemployment insurance crisis during the pandemic — the people in the Employment Development Department were working grueling hours and cared deeply. The public outrage was understandable, but didn’t exactly help morale.

Now there is something I want to say, and it has to do with how to turn your despair in a situation like this into action. But first, what am I talking about and what happened? (Skip the next several paragraphs if you already follow the story.) FAFSA is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Kids applying to college and some returning students fill it out and submit it to the Department of Education, which uses the information in the form to determine their eligibility for student financial aid. The Department of Education then sends the students back a Student Aid Report (SAR) which helps them understand the different types of financial aid they may be eligible for, and transmits the data they’ve collected to the schools the students have chosen, so the schools can determine the financial aid packages they want to offer each student. 

The form itself has long been considered overly burdensome. And of course, it’s a burden low income students bear the most. Wednesday’s story in the New York Times profiles a young woman named Andrea, who hopes to be the first person in her family to attend college, if she can get through the process. Erica L. Green and Zach Montague write: 

Although the previous FAFSA form was long and complex, seniors at Andrea’s school managed to fill out their forms without much incident in previous years. KIPP Colorado…holds an annual FAFSA night, when families gather to complete the form together.

For a long time, observers have pointed out that the burden of filling out the FAFSA could be mitigated with good service design. It’s kind of like applying for a mortgage — it’s never going to be a trivial process, because your bank does legitimately need a lot of information, but some banks have made it a lot easier than it used to be by gathering some of the information for you, using branching logic to hide questions that don't apply to you, making the questions clearer, making it easy to submit documentation through your mobile phone, and all sorts of other common design tactics. I assume either the Department of Education agreed or someone in the White House forced their hand, because they launched an effort to create a better online version of FAFSA. This version cut the previous 100 questions down to 40, which is great. 

But it wasn’t better. From the same article: 

This year, only about 20 percent of the students at FAFSA night were able to complete the form — a huge change from previous years, school officials said.

 Students reported being repeatedly kicked out or locked out of the form, or hung up on after holding for 30 minutes to three hours for someone to answer the department’s help line.

But it gets worse in several ways. One that’s been widely reported is that the Department of Education has been delayed in transmitting the data they collect through the FAFSA to colleges. That means the colleges have been delayed in offering aid packages to the students. As before, this affects low-income kids much more than even middle class kids, since their families are far more price sensitive and, as the article says, “a few thousand dollars of difference can determine whether they start school at all or finish a program that they’ve already begun.” 

But then yesterday we found out another problem. The new online FAFSA form does not work for people who don’t have a social security number. So…

To get students with missing social security data approved, the Education Department asked applicants like Andrea to submit by email photographs of a driver’s license, identity card or other documents that would verify their identity. As the department prepared to announce last week that the social security number issue had been resolved, officials realized that the inbox, and its 70,000 emails, had gone untouched.

This is where my heart breaks. 70,000 kids have written in to complete their applications and their info has just been sitting there as the entire college application season is closing. It’s not clear what’s going to happen to them. Many of those kids are Dreamers, trying to get a leg up. And the Ed team is scrambling to fix it; it’s clear their hearts are breaking too. “We worked all night long — literally — all night,” one staffer was quoted as saying. 

But this is also instructive, I think, for those who are asking what happened? I don’t have any special knowledge here, so I don’t know how that inbox ended up orphaned for all those months, but I do know that government has a self-conception problem of massive proportions. It thinks of itself as a policy institution. Implementation of that policy is not core to the institution’s work. The problem seems to be that we’re bad at websites, once again, but that’s not really it. The inbox problem had nothing to do with the website. A problem like that happens in an institution that isn’t good at implementation because it doesn’t value it.

The search for someone to blame is on. The Times piece casually mentions that the company the Department of Education contracted with for the new FAFSA had also worked on healthcare.gov. It’s a swipe that doesn’t mean anything. There were 54 companies that worked on healthcare.gov, and as far as I know they’re all still doing lots of business with lots of parts of government. I don’t think highly of many of these contractors, but the ones that win these bids are objectively good at what government asks them to do, which is largely to master voluminous, opaque procurement processes and documentation, and then to fulfill a long list of pre-specified, detailed requirements that don’t add up to applications that actually work. It should not be a mystery why these companies often aren’t good at making forms that work for people because that is not what we ask them to do. We have a bad system, and the contractors can’t do anything about that, so blaming them gets us nowhere. 

It’s hard to find someone to blame because delivery in government is in a sense no one’s actual responsibility. Lots of people work on something like a redo of the FAFSA, but the vast majority of them work on gathering requirements, creating a request for proposal, judging bids from vendors and awarding contracts, monitoring if the contractor is fulfilling the requirements, and checking for adherence to a wide variety of compliance frameworks. It’s rare for these people to have expertise in digital, service design, user experience, or even the operations of the program the technology is supposed to help administer. They’re masters of the arcane processes, which makes them incredibly valuable (and requires them to be incredibly diligent and dedicated), but, like the contractors, the jobs they’re asked to do are not actually the work that needs doing. It is work that “meets government needs, but not user needs.” It is work government has largely invented, or at least ballooned to epic proportions, not the work of actually delivering value. Everyone has done what they were supposed to do within the system we’ve created, and there is no one to obviously blame for the fact that things don’t work.

This is literally what happened with the 70,000 unread emails. It was no one’s job to deal with them, or even know how many of them were there. No one had checked the inbox. That seems crazy, but it’s not so crazy for delivery to fall through the cracks when delivery is not what the Department thinks it does. 

It’s not that the Biden administration doesn’t care about low-income college students. Biden’s team has spent enormous effort on student loan forgiveness, for example. I’m neither arguing for or against that policy, nor for or against their having spent many leadership cycles on policy and politics in general, but I am saying that it’s a mistake to think that policy is the only, or even the main, way to actually help low income students. As a friend said the other day, “if you care about equity, you have to care about state capacity.” 

State capacity is simply the ability of a government to accomplish its policy goals. In other words, it’s capacity to actually do what it says it will do. As I said in my first post here, and will likely say again many times, I believe we are in a crisis of state capacity. It’s not a crisis in the same way FAFSA is a crisis, just as arteriosclerosis is not a crisis the same way a car accident is. The second happens quickly and highly visibly. The first happens slowly, over a long period of time, and is largely invisible, though its effects may be seen through a person’s increasingly limited physical activity. But both can be life-threatening. After a car accident, you are forced to focus on your health and recovery. On the other hand, you can have constantly advancing arteriosclerosis but, like the proverbial boiled frog, never decide to make the lifestyle changes that will prevent a heart attack, because at any given time you have other more pressing priorities. 

I would not be surprised to hear that the Department of Education took this project very seriously, and had far more leadership attention on it than normal. I don’t think the problem is that they didn’t care. I suspect that the problem is that though they tried to do some things differently in the hopes of getting a different outcome than in the past, they had not prioritized building the capacity and gaining the competencies they would need to get that different outcome. Doing that requires a specific theory of change coming from leadership that often doesn’t come naturally. And it requires time, constant attention, and the will to break long-established habits, in the same way that someone suffering from arteriosclerosis must live a very different life over a long period of time in order to improve their health.

In government, the car accidents are crises but the arteriosclerosis is just the way things are. Our leadership does not acknowledge a crisis of state capacity, in part because they are dealing with so many visible crises: polarization, Russian in Ukraine, China, climate collapse, immigration and, of course, a very steep election effort for the current administration. But the crisis of state capacity underpins and exacerbates all these crises, including, frankly, the election odds. I won’t belabor the point of each of these connections – there’s more to say about each but I think the dots connect pretty easily for most people. 

And that brings me to how the public might respond to a failure like FAFSA with something more productive than outrage. If you are involved politically, through donating to candidates or other means, for any party or faction, you have a voice. Maybe it’s a big voice, maybe it’s small, but you have a voice. The way you could help prevent the next FAFSA is to put state capacity on the agenda with those who will listen. Your ask is simple: we are in a crisis of state capacity. Leadership should acknowledge it, and direct the bureaucracy to act like it. 

We act differently in a crisis. We weigh the costs of fidelity to process against the urgent need for clear outcomes, and outcomes win. Right now they’re losing. Case in point: we are in a crisis of hiring in government. Not just hiring more people, hiring the right people. But time to hire seems to have gone up under Biden, not just relative to the Trump years, but also to the Obama years. That’s the wrong direction. That’s peacetime drift towards proceduralism. What we need is a wartime jump to action. We need shorter hiring times for properly scoped roles in which candidates are assessed for their actual skills. (For more on how and why we don’t get these, see this post.) We need government to be able to hire, to focus, to streamline, to make clear and timely decisions, to act with speed and intention. Don’t tell me we can’t do any of these things now because Trump might be in charge again soon. He’s going to be in charge if we don’t do these things.

There are three ways to increase state capacity. You can have more of the right people, you can focus them on the right things, and you can burden them less. This substack is going to talk about each of these things in much greater depth over the coming year, but you don’t need a thousand examples to make your point. All you need to do is to tell the next candidate who asks for your dollar or your vote that both are dependent on them acknowledging this crisis and committing to doing something about it. (If they say yes, feel free to send them my way for more details and suggestions.) It’s natural to feel angry about failures like this FAFSA application, and even to look for a culprit, but that won’t get us anywhere. We have to instead start demanding the leadership we need to prevent the next failure.