Please Enter A Screenshot Showing Your Windows Activation Status

[Tina Larzelere]

DescriptionWhen searching for a school from the 2024-25 FAFSA form, the full name of a school may not be displayed on the screen. In the case of a school with multiple programs or locations, this makes it difficult for a user to know which entry to select.

Description: Graduate students who are notified of having a Pell-eligible Estimated Student Aid Index (SAI) after submitting a 2024-25 FAFSA are shown an incorrect message stating they may be eligible for a specific Federal Pell Grant amount. Although a graduate student could have an SAI that is Pell-eligible, the graduate student is ineligible to receive a Federal Pell Grant and should not receive the incorrect message.

Workaround: A parent who encounters this issue will need the student to access or restart the 2024-25 FAFSA form. If the student logs in to StudentAid.gov and does not see the application under My Activity, the student will need to navigate to the FAFSA landing page, start a new form as a student, and invite the parent to the application. This action will nullify the previous FAFSA form initiated by the parent.

Note: Due to another known issue, users will need to confirm their settings the first time they log in each day. If a user changes their address back to their foreign address, they will need to follow this workaround the next time they log in (if on another day).

Description: All users without a Social Security number (SSN), including those with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), must manually enter their financial information in the 2024-25 FAFSA form due to an issue that prevents financial information for those users from being pulled into the FAFSA form. We still encourage all impacted users to enter an ITIN, if they have one.

Workaround: There is currently no workaround to this issue. Once a permanent fix is identified and implemented, the Department will attempt to retrieve federal tax information (FTI) for an affected user via the direct data exchange with the IRS and will reprocess the FAFSA, as necessary, to reflect any changes. There is currently no estimated timeline for resolution of this issue.

Workaround: Contributors who are unable to accept the FAFSA invitation should wait until their information has been verified by the SSA before re-attempting to access the FAFSA invitation.

Description: When a FAFSA contributor who has a pending Social Security Administration (SSA) match status attempts to enter the FAFSA form via an invitation, they are blocked and are shown messaging stating they are unable to enter the form while they still have a pending SSA match status.

Description: In some cases, when an applicant is completing a correction, the values previously entered into the assets fields (e.g., total of cash, savings, and checking accounts) are removed from the correction and the user is asked to provide them again. If the student is dependent, the parent(s) may also be prompted to make a correction to their section of the form and provide asset information. Similarly, if the parent starts a correction to their section of the form, they may be asked to provide their asset information again. It may also trigger a required action for the student to provide assets again in their section.

The user (whether student or parent) should re-enter the values in the assets fields, sign, and submit. If the student is dependent and on the Section Complete page they see messaging displayed that indicates their parent must also take action to correct their section of the form, the parent should also log in to re-enter the values in the parent assets fields.

Description: Students can add additional schools to a processed FAFSA correction, even if the correction transaction was initiated by an FAA via the FAFSA Partner Portal (FPP) and contains a professional judgment flag. Transactions that have been generated by corrections made via the FPP should not be available to students to add additional schools.

Previous Workaround: FAFSA contributors may log in to StudentAid.gov to access the form via Dashboard or in My Activity. Once logged in to StudentAid.gov, the contributor also has the option to click on the link in the invitation email to be taken to the right place.

Resolution: A student who is a citizen and initially selects "Eligible noncitizen" on the 2024-25 FAFSA form will now be able to complete the form after the student changes the citizenship status response to "U.S. citizen or national".

Previous Workaround: There is currently no workaround for a parent without an SSN. A student may start the application, but the parent will not be able to contribute the parent information. The student and parent will be able to complete the 2024-25 FAFSA form online once the issue is resolved.

Note: A related issue previously resulted in a contributor with no SSN and no existing FSA ID being unable to see the FAFSA form to which the contributor was invited on the Dashboard/My Activity page. This resulted in the contributor being unable to access that form. That issue also is resolved.

Previous Description: From the start of the soft launch period through Jan. 5, 2024, some students who searched from the 2024-25 FAFSA form for a school to enter on the FAFSA were presented with a Federal School Code associated with that school that had previously been deactivated. There was no way for the student to know that a deactivated Federal School Code had been selected, and the student submitted the 2024-25 FAFSA with the deactivated Federal School Code. On Jan. 6, 2024, we implemented a fix to prevent deactivated Federal School Codes from being presented to students on the 2024-25 FAFSA from that date forward.

Interim Resolution: Federal Student Aid (FSA) implemented an interim fix that stops this issue from occurring for affected parents until such time as FSA implements a permanent fix. A parent contributor who was previously prevented from completing the 2024-25 FAFSA form online page can return to the form and pick up where the parent left off.

Resolution: A student who selects the Eligible Noncitizen status on the 2024-25 FAFSA form and proceeds to enter an A-Number that ends in zero is no longer prevented from completing and submitting the form.

Previous Description: Some students who have a birth year of 2000 are unable to review and submit a 2024-25 FAFSA form because they are continuously looped to the Student Unusual Circumstances page. The student receives no error message to explain why this is happening and despite being able to temporarily navigate past the Student Unusual Circumstances page the loop recurs and prohibits review and submission of the form.

Previous Workaround: There is currently no workaround to this issue; however, FSA has identified its cause and is working to implement a fix. The student will be able to complete the 2024-25 FAFSA Form online once the issue is resolved.

Previous Workaround: Dependent students with at least one parent contributor without an SSN can try following this guidance to submit the 2024-25 FAFSA form. Note: This workaround does not work for independent students who are married and filed taxes separately from their spouse. For now, we advise independent applicants who have started a form and encountered this error to wait to invite any contributors without an SSN to the 2024-25 FAFSA form. We are working to resolve this issue in March.

Resolution (Short-Term): On 3/25/24, the Department implemented a nightly data clean up that will archive duplicate accounts. With this update, users who experienced this issue in the past should now be able to invite a contributor. In addition, the workaround guidance to users who have issues adding a contributor to their form was updated to include instructions for users on what to do if they encounter an issue inviting a contributor. The guidance is available at -events/fafsa-support/contributor-social-security-number.

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