Students, parents, and taxpayers received some rare good news late last month from the Department of Education: Richard Cordray, a longtime ideologue with the Biden and Obama administrations, is leaving his post at the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA).
Cordray’s three-year tenure at helm of FSA was marked by incompetence, vengefulness, and inconsistency, making his resignation long overdue. His bungled rollout of the department’s revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) — a slow motion trainwreck that has left millions of high school seniors uncertain about their futures — has leaders from across the political spectrum demanding answers. As of this writing, they still don’t have any.
The inability of the FSA Office to correct their error not only creates more headaches for parents, but will ultimately translate to fewer kids attending college. The Biden-made FAFSA disaster disproportionately harms black students, 90 percent of whom receive federal financial aid.
Cordray’s FAFSA snafu is much more than the usual ho-hum, “good enough for government work” mistake Americans have come to expect from Washington. It is a nightmare scenario, the likes of which hasn’t happened since the Obama administration’s botched introduction of the Obamacare website. Just ask students and parents, especially lower-income and minority families — the very groups this administration professes to champion — whose post-secondary education plans remain in limbo. Or colleges and universities, which the department has begged, pleaded, and cajoled to push back their commitment deadlines again and again.
When it was authorized by Congress in 2020, the FAFSA overhaul was intended to make student aid more accessible. Cordray and the Biden Department of Education managed to do the opposite. Student aid applications are down nearly 30 percent, and lower still among low-income students.
One might expect that, presented with reality, the Department of Education would at long last face the music and offer a mea culpa. Instead, Cordray and his agency doubled down. “Over my tenure, we … made it easier for people to apply for and manage student aid,” he boasted in a statement. For the high school seniors unsure of how or if they will be able to finance their college aspirations next fall, that must feel like salt in the wound.
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