Colleges Are Facing an Enrollment Nightmare
A botched effort to streamline the financial-aid process may prevent a huge number of students from going to college in the fall.
Fafsa debacle
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Hockey scholarship.Colleges Are Facing an Enrollment Nightmare
A botched effort to streamline the financial-aid process may prevent a huge number of students from going to college in the fall.www.theatlantic.com
Dentists need more patients.
Colleges Are Facing an Enrollment Nightmare
A botched effort to streamline the financial-aid process may prevent a huge number of students from going to college in the fall.
From the article, the bottom line looks to me like Congress set a deadline and the DoE couldn't meet it. Rather than going back to Congress and getting an extension, they blundered ahead and ended up with a pile of shit.
I have no idea if they tried to do the programming in house or if they hired it out. Regardless, this is what happens when you have a top down edict (no matter how well intentioned) dumped down from people who have no practical idea how it's supposed to be accomplished. When they saw back in the spring of 23 it wasn't going to be ready they should have just gone with the old form and saved the "New and Improved" version for the following year.
This is nothing new. Remember the ill fated launch of HealthCare.Gov? IIRC, Obama picked up the phone and called Google and told them to send their best and brightest and get the thing fixed, goddammit. They got the job done in short order, and it's worked well ever since.
I don't remember this. The google engineers were paid for their services I'm assuming? And were they given an option to accept the government contract or were they "told" to send their best and brightest? They don't work for Obama.
Let's assume they were paid and they accpeted the job willingly. We're celebrating the fact that the tax payer subsidized initial website design needed to be further tax payer subsidized in hiring engineers to fix their shitty work? Awesome.
Apparently they didn't learn from the healthcare.gov debacle. Shocking.
www.gao.gov
Healthcare.gov: Ineffective Planning and Oversight Practices Underscore the Need for Improved Contract Management
What GAO Found The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) undertook the development of Healthcare.gov and its related systems without...
Our federal government is the largest entity (by dollars and employment) that has ever existed.Apparently they didn't learn from the healthcare.gov debacle. Shocking.
Healthcare.gov: Ineffective Planning and Oversight Practices Underscore the Need for Improved Contract Management
What GAO Found The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) undertook the development of Healthcare.gov and its related systems without...
5 TRILLION in revenue. And they can't build a website.
Think about that level of incompetence and then ask yourself why they should have any money or responsibility at all...
I'm in that business and called it from day 1. No way they'll ever be able to pull anything like that off, and I mean ever.
My impression is that all the various .gov sites are done in isolation on different platforms with different types of coding by different people and none of them play nicely with others. Which is a problem with sites like this FAFSA and the ACA which have to access and integrate info from other systems scattered throughout the government.
It would be a massive undertaking and cost a bunch and take decades, but the US government needs to set up a Department of IT and have all their shit based on the same platforms and code base and use consistent front facing UIs.
Who should we hold accountable for this? This isn’t some tax cut or boondoggle—this affects people’s lives in a serious way. I’m sure Biden didn’t have a clue about how this would get done, nor would any President. But shouldn’t he hold someone or someones accountable?
Yeah, if I'm Biden I'm having a long discussion with the Sec of DoE and asking why they blundered ahead knowing full well they weren't going to be able to get this done in time. Per the article they knew in the spring of last year they were fvcked. Let the WH know and they could have gotten Congress to address the deadline. Instead, they shrugged and kept on, knowing it was going to be a disaster.
That kind of behavior is common in the private sector too. Projects that aren't going to meet deadlines or other parameters wait until the shit hits the fan instead of proactively dealing with the delays and setbacks before they blow up in their faces.
How is it within the Federal government purview to offer student grants and loans? Is college not expensive enough without the federal government inflating the money supply?
Like all things government. An action that may or may not have been warranted for a particular time and circumstance that was expanded and continued in perpetuity....
It's the data. It's always the data.
Even companies that have their shit together struggle with their data.
You are pretty much spot on. The Dept of Ed files then have to integrate and translate into other products (Oracle, etc) at the schools. The schools have to test, retest, stage, test, etc… And the schools have mods and hundreds of queries/code created based on specific fields/codes that will also need to be updated.
I could go on but it’s late.
Because an educated populace is better overall for the economy? They knew that in the 60s and 70s when 1/3 of Boomers got bachelor’s degrees.
Unfortunately, state funding for higher education keeps falling so more of the cost shifts to the students/families.
But a lot fewer once some nerd with an education designed a machine to do it. Lol.
I filed the FAFSA on January 3. It filed without my signature. That was an error that couldn’t be fixed until after processing. The form processed in mid March, but the error prevented us from receiving the full score. I still can’t sign the form. The message says check back sometime in April.
Some schools have moved decision day back to June 1. Some haven’t. I have no idea how the admissions departments will be able to process all the forms that are dumped on them at the same time. It’s been a catastrophic failure.
Some schools have moved decision day back to June 1. Some haven’t. I have no idea how the admissions departments will be able to process all the forms that are dumped on them at the same time. It’s been a catastrophic failure.
Aren’t these obvious examples of why smaller government is better?
Isn’t that part of the problem though? If it’s currently unsustainable based on government funding, why don’t universities and colleges adapt?
That’s a great question I don’t even pretend to have an answer to. I wish the government would at least keep pace on their funding levels, but that still won’t solve the total problem because costs are rising greater than inflation and even if the state supported higher ed at 1970s rates, it still wouldn’t be as affordable as it was then.
Part of the increase is completely understandable and logical, e.g., updating campuses for high speed internet & WiFi is a no brainer. But I’m sure there are some campus amenities that add to the cost without adding to the education.
I’m pretty solid that the system is broken but also that anyone that thinks it’s an easy one solution fix (as with most policy issues) is probably wrong.
I certainly don’t find the colleges blameless. However, when thinking about state schools, you have to remember that state legislatures are involved in the process. It’s those state legislatures that have cut higher education funding to state schools throughout time. It’s to a point where a school like Purdue isn’t really a state school. There’s essentially no priority given to Indiana kids.
I worked as a developer in multiple languages for 30+ years. All projects with multiple entities that wanted/needed slightly different behaviors/benefits from the software were a pain. Everybody thinks their wants are the most important and they were the most likely to skip requirements meetings. Transmitting data between systems wasn't a big deal; XML tag and data definition and a location to send it was all I needed. What you do with it on your end is not my concern as long as what I deliver contains the bits and pieces you need.
Even though I was a lowly developer I spent a tremendous amount of time asking when, where, WHY, who questions and telling people who could fire me "No".
With all that said and running in parallel for weeks we still had misses. Something the size of the FAFSA project would be breathtaking on every level and would require months of QA and parallel testing.
I don’t think you understand the purpose of government. It might be better overall for everybody if each person got a pony and their student loans forgiven.
Just because something is viewed as “good” doesn’t mean it’s in the governments purview to provide it.
Do you understand that concept?
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
What a horseshit defense. By that standard you could argue there is nothing outside the federal government purview.
Keep reading that constitution bucko. Where do they go into detail on subsidizing higher ed?
Get out of my face with that crap.
The necessary and proper clause has been found to be pretty expansive.
But since you’re an expert, you should file a lawsuit to declare the department of ed unconstitutional. Report back when you win!
We have gubernatorial candidates proposing phasing out the sate income tax while the legislature wants to dictate that college students of a certain persuasion can't have their feelings hurt. The future of higher education in Indiana is bleak.
I’ve been really interested in what his plan actually is with income tax rates being flat here and property tax rates being capped constitutionally.
Like I really want to find out how he wants to fund government and/or what he’ll cut to get what he wants.
Add on federal tax info from the IRS on the import files and you got yourself lots of compliance fun.. then add on additional compliance policies at the fed and state levels.
It's actually a completely legitimate use of the govt.
Now maybe you think it's something the govt shouldn't be doing... But there is no constitutional issue with it. Rand Paul even said as much on the Senate floor this week while attacking earmark spending
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The Department of Education attempted to reform FAFSA…it has been a cluster to put it mildly.
Now the President claims he’s “fixing the broken student loan system”.
I do not have a lot of confidence that this goes any better
Fix the system that they made worse. Reminds me of the Harry Browne quote.
"The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, 'See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk"
FAFSA update. I’m still unable to sign. I keep getting emails from colleges telling me I have an incomplete form and that they cannot determine financial aid eligibility. It’s April 10th.
My friend is the lead systems guy that handles fafsa import stuff and problems like yours may not be resolved for several weeks (and possibly longer). I’m assuming those colleges have carry over processes that auto-send communications based on error codes, which they should have turned off.
Even if they could determine eligibility, there’s a chance your imported info is incorrect due to Dept of Ed eff ups.
I get to hear all about it during our weekly disc golf rounds. It’s a cluster.
Kind of self-explanatory.
The guy that handles all the data ingestion is gawd dam hippy!!
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