"The Department of Education on Tuesday announced yet another delay in this year’s much-criticized rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, indicating that colleges will not begin receiving applicants’ federal aid information until March at the earliest.

In a press conference Tuesday morning, education under secretary James Kvaal said the department plans to begin sending students’ FAFSA information, contained in Institutional Student Information Records (ISIR), to colleges 'in batches in the first half of March'—nearly two months later than the late-January timeline the department indicated when the FAFSA soft launched at the end of 2023.

Kvaal declined to specify an exact date or guarantee that colleges would receive the forms by March. That has many worried that, after months of mercurially shifting timelines, colleges may not receive students’ records until closer to April or even May. Such a shift is certain to give applicants a much narrower window in which to weigh their college-going options.

'With this last-minute news, our nation’s colleges are once again left scrambling as they determine how best to work within these new timelines to issue aid offers as soon as possible,' Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, wrote in a statement. 'These continued delays, communicated at the last minute, threaten to harm the very students and families that federal student aid is intended to help.'

Universities may be forced to push their usual May 1 student commitment deadlines back to June or even July. Pérez said that while discussions with NACAC member institutions were ongoing, he 'can’t imagine' maintaining the traditional May 1 deadline under these circumstances," reports Inside Higher Ed.

Photo: The latest FAFSA delay could be the most disruptive of the rollout so far and threatens to force colleges to rethink their timelines for finalizing incoming classes. Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Getty Images