The Department of Education recently released an announcement outlining a technical glitch that they were experiencing with the FAFSA website.

Apparently, students accessing FAFSA.ED.GOV with an unsupported web browser were provided an error message and then directed to the 2009-2010 FAFSA submission page and not 2010-2011 (which they were initially seeking). As a result, many of the applicants probably submitted the wrong data to their schools.

The Department of Education states that the browser problem started on February 23rd after a website update. They were notified of the issue on March 11th and the problem was corrected on March 16th. After analysis, they anticipate that fewer than 5000 families (or.2 percent of the 2.8 million applications received) were impacted by the problem. From what I can tell, it appears that more first year students are more likely to be affected in comparison to returning students.

Starting March 26th, the Department of Education is going to be sending an email communication to all families that may have been affected by this technical issue (letters will be sent to those that did not supply valid email addresses). Here is a copy of that letter.

So, if you filed your FAFSA between February 23rd and March 16th, you may want to log back into your account and double check to make sure that you did indeed submit 2010-2011 data and not 2009-2010. If you find that you were impacted by the problem above, you will want to drop a line to the Federal Student Aid Information Center at (800) 4-FED-AID and they will help walk you through the steps to correct your FAFSA information.

Hope you find this information useful. If you know of anyone that may benefit from this, please be sure to use the “Share Tab” below to pass it along.