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    Thursday, May 16, 2024

    UConn enrollment pushed to June due to FAFSA problems

    High school students waiting to decide which college to attend in the fall may have to wait a bit longer. A technical problem with financial aid information is forcing some schools, including UConn, to delay enrollment by a full month.

    Financial aid offers for the University of Connecticut aren't expected until later this month, so the university has extended the deadline for incoming students enrolling for the fall, pushing the date back to June 1.

    "We recognize the importance of allowing our accepted students and their supporters ample time to consider our offer and to assess the cost of attendance," UConn told prospective students in a letter. "We anticipate releasing aid offers by late April to students who are financial aid applicants."

    As a result, the deadline for housing applications has been pushed back to June 14, though students who would like to commit to UConn can do so anytime before June 1.

    This is the second problem this year with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly referred to as the FAFSA. First, a rare update to the FAFSA form earlier this year made the process unexpectedly more complicated.

    "We are putting all hands on deck and using every lever we have to make sure we can achieve the transformational potential of the Better FAFSA to make higher education possible for many more of our nation's students," U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a February news release.

    Though Cardona said then that the technical updates would "not impact our implementation timelines," another problem arose.

    In late March, the U.S. Department of Education said there was an issue getting tax information from the Internal Revenue Service. On March 31, the DOE said that "fewer than 20 percent of applications" were affected by one of three issues: Data fields mistakenly used a mix of updated and original returns "leading to inconsistent tax data," inaccuracies in the education tax credit data field or inaccuracies for manually-entered tax information.

    "We recognize how important it is for schools and families to have the information they need to package and receive aid offers," the IRS wrote. "Accordingly, we will continue our joint efforts with IRS to resolve these issues and implement updates to resolve data inaccuracies as expeditiously as possible."

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