Weathering the Financial Aid Firestorm: A FormFest 2024 Profile

Tait Chamberlain and Sean Cassidy: Weathering the financial aid firestorm

If you follow the world of federal forms (hi, welcome to FormFest), you’ve probably heard a bit about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Created in 1992, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid aimed to provide equal opportunities to anyone seeking higher education. But inequities persisted. The form was cumbersome, with 108 questions about income, identification and taxes that were often difficult for applicants to answer. In 2021, Congress directed the U.S. Department of Education to simplify the form—a process that was plagued by delays and high-profile technical glitches that affected millions of students. To weather the crisis, Tait Chamberlain and Sean Cassidy embraced open communication, kept stakeholders informed and engaged, and emerged on the other side with a reinvented form designed to make life easier for students nationwide.

Tait Chamberlain: The (career) path less traveled

Initially, Tait Chamberlain’s own academic journey didn’t point to a career in Federal Student Aid. An English major, he spent the first six years of his career in advertising, developing applications and training programs for appliance sales and crafting marketing and content strategy for computers. The work was fine, but unfulfilling. So, after obtaining a master’s degree in human-computer interaction—and a six-month break to hike 2,186 on the Appalachian Trail, no biggie—Tait turned to the public sector.

He began at the municipal level, developing a police data initiative as an open-data fellow in Michigan and working on user experience tech in Chicago, before joining the U.S. Department of Education in 2019 as the agency’s first-ever in-house user experience designer. That work had previously been outsourced to contractors, which the agency had limited ability to oversee without its own full-time expert. Being the first can often be daunting, but for Tait, it was seamless.

“The need was clear, so the organization has been behind us… I’ve never had to sell the idea of talking to users, or of user experience design generally.”

Sean Cassidy: A harmonious mismatch

Sean Cassidy’s career is a marriage of unlikely bedfellows: Journalism and tech. The common thread? Making complex things easier to understand.

“Generally, what I enjoy is the ability to connect my work to people,” he said. “I studied and did journalism in college and subsequently found UX as a discipline in which I could talk with people and also help build things that improved their lives.”

Sean led UX research for the FAFSA overhaul, interviewing hundreds of parents and students across the country and then incorporating their experiences into the design process to make the form more intuitive for users. Those outreach efforts included a massive beta-testing initiative that dispatched observers to monitor the submission process at early-access events (“FAFSA Nights”) across the country. The real-time feedback from parents and students sparked a host of improvements, including a simple rework that reduced by more than 90% the number of students accidentally opting out of Pell grants. Speaking directly to users also made the work feel more real.

“It was humbling to meet with so many first-generation college students and families and be part of their first-time FAFSA experience… I love that in UX and especially civic design, you are generally working toward the common good and have a mandate to improve outcomes for people.”

Communication is key

The FAFSA overhaul was the ultimate user-experience project: a complete rebuild of both the front-facing form and the backend processing. It was a massive undertaking informed by a relatively simple premise: which parts of the form were performing the worst? Where were people making mistakes? What question regularly made people give up entirely? And then: what can we do to fix it?

The process made sense, but the implementation was rocky. The agency struggled to provide clear timelines for new features and to communicate its efforts to troubleshoot delays and glitches. Administrators were hesitant to disseminate inaccurate information or to release a comprehensive list of ongoing problems, which would have been helpful for users. But over time, it became clear that communication and transparency were essential to maintaining trust with students and parents.

“This year, we were much more transparent,” Tait said. “It just lowered the temperature. People felt more heard and were more willing to wait, and they were eager and happy to participate. Failing to communicate just made it all so much worse.”

FormFest Session Abstract & Details

Education Forms from Preschool to College

Breakout Session | December 4, 2024 | 12:50 PM-1:50 PMET

Learn from the South Carolina Early Childhood Advisory Council’s work developing a single portal to integrate applications for publicly funded programs and services, and from the office of Federal Student Aid’s work on the FAFSA form.

The FAFSA® form: Reinvented after 40 years
Tait Chamberlain, Sean Cassidy

Each year, the office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) provides more than $114 billion in federal student aid to help students pay for college or career school. And it all starts with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA® form. The FAFSA form is completed by more than 15 million students annually and is the first step to federal and state grants, loans, and work-study. And for more than 40 years, the form remained mostly unchanged. But with the passage of the FAFSA Simplification Act and the FUTURE Act, it was time to reinvent the form. Setbacks have put us in the news more than the U.S. Department of Education is used to. But ultimately we’re taking advantage of core changes to make the digital process faster, simpler, and more equitable for millions of students and families.