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The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) is calling on Congress to take legislative action and require the Education Department to give colleges until July 2025 to comply with the reporting requirements in the new gainful employment and financial value transparency rule.
The department already pushed back the deadline from July 31 to Oct. 1 earlier this year after colleges said they needed more time to gather and report new program-level information, including the total cost of attendance and the amount of private education loans disbursed to students. Colleges argued that the extension was needed in light of the challenges associated with the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FASFA), which was delayed and has been beset with numerous issues.
While NASFAA appreciated the two-month extension, the association said in a letter to Congress this week that the department didn’t go far enough and has yet to provide all the information that colleges need to comply with the reporting requirements. Financial aid administrators want a one-year extension. The request, NASFAA president Justin Draeger argued, wouldn’t affect the department’s plan to start holding institutions accountable for their outcomes under the rule starting July 1, 2026.
“While the original timeline provided institutions just a few months to complete their part and provided ED with two years,” Draeger wrote, “our request gives institutions and ED each about a year to pull together their data and reporting schemas respectively, a fair compromise considering the significant amount of additional work institutions have been forced to take on this year because of the FAFSA issues.”
The issues with the FAFSA compressed the timeline for financial aid professionals to process applications and send aid letters to students, and created more work for administrators “who are already hanging on by a thread,” Draeger wrote. On most campuses, the financial aid office is likely to be in charge of complying with the rule’s “extremely burdensome” reporting requirements.
Draeger wrote that the department is rushing to meet a self-imposed deadline to begin carrying out the new gainful employment rule, which takes effect July 1.
“Schools want to comply with ED’s regulations and are frantically trying to find a way to meet ED’s October 1 institutional reporting deadline,” he wrote, “but it is to the detriment of other priorities that have already fallen behind through no fault of their own.”
