The 2027–2028 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form is delivering aid eligibility estimates to many students almost immediately, a shift that was enabled by new real-time data connections and a more iterative approach to software development.
The Education Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) oversees the FAFSA, which around 18 million Americans file each year to receive federal student financial aid.
This year, the department opened the FAFSA form online on Sept. 23, marking the earliest launch in the program’s history. GDIT, which received the FAFSA Award Eligibility Determination contract in 2022, built and implemented the backend system that powers the online experience.
“The Trump Administration redesigned and streamlined the form with American students and families in mind,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement.
In a recent interview with MeriTalk, Shad Harp, GDIT’s vice president who leads the company’s FAFSA program, said that most students now take about 15 minutes to complete the FAFSA form.
Harp said that one of the biggest changes to the form this year is its ability to conduct real-time data matching with other government systems.
The FAFSA system can now pull tax information directly from the IRS and validate identities through the Social Security Administration in real time, he said. A real-time connection with the National Student Loan Data System also eliminated a process that previously contributed to multi-day waits for eligibility information.
“For most students, the form will now provide an instantaneous result of what your aid eligibility will be, because we connect directly into the students’ loan information,” Harp said.
Behind those changes, GDIT is also using artificial intelligence (AI) to assist its software development process.
“We are leveraging AI for every step of our software development lifecycle,” Harp said.
“The cool thing about what GDIT is bringing to the table here is we are model agnostic from a technology perspective,” Harp said, adding that development teams can build AI agents with skills designed to meet GDIT’s quality requirements.
He said the software development lifecycle at GDIT includes automated testing designed to catch problems before code reaches production.
“We don’t merge code into testing or production if our automated quality checks find any bugs,” he said. “This enabled us to enhance the efficacy and security of the application process.”
GDIT also beta tested the FAFSA form with smaller groups of students before opening it more broadly, gradually increasing the number of users ahead of the full launch.
“We’re no longer doing big bang releases,” Harp said. “We tested this year’s form with a smaller subset of students at universities across the country. Once we were confident that the form and improvements were working, we kept increasing the number of users until we released the application to the public.”
Harp said that approach reflects one of GDIT’s biggest takeaways from earlier FAFSA modernization efforts.
“I think the biggest lesson that we learned was to deliver early and often so we can find and respond quickly to any issues,” Harp said.