The nation’s prime scholar help official is stepping down, the Schooling Division stated Friday, after the disastrous rollout of a brand new monetary help type that upended the school admissions course of for hundreds of thousands of scholars this 12 months.
Richard Cordray, who took over because the chief of the Federal Scholar Assist workplace in 2021, will hand over his duties in June, Schooling Secretary Miguel A. Cardona stated in an announcement.
Mr. Cordray’s departure coincides with a fraught admissions season. School directors, college students and members of Congress throughout the political spectrum have rebuked the Schooling Division for mismanaging a redesign of the Free Software for Federal Scholar Assist type, throwing the same old faculty admissions course of into disarray.
In his position, Mr. Cordray additionally oversaw a wide range of different applications, together with many elements of the Biden administration’s sweeping imaginative and prescient of scholar debt reduction for hundreds of thousands of debtors by means of mortgage forgiveness and income-driven compensation plans.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that Wealthy helped change hundreds of thousands of lives for the higher,” Mr. Cardona stated in an announcement.
Earlier than becoming a member of the division, Mr. Cordray spent six years as the primary director of the Client Monetary Safety Bureau, the place he pursued debt collectors and financiers and helped extract round $12 billion in refunds and canceled money owed for practically 30 million folks.
Although Mr. Cordray got here with no expertise administering education schemes, his arrival was celebrated as a win by the Biden administration when Mr. Cardona was working onerous to advertise and perform President Biden’s plan to cancel greater than $400 billion in scholar debt for tens of hundreds of thousands of debtors.
By the tip of final 12 months, nonetheless, the Biden administration’s scholar debt plans have been struck down by the Supreme Court docket and warning indicators have been flashing that the Schooling Division had let different priorities slip, particularly the launch of the brand new FAFSA type.
The venture to simplify the shape and make it extra accessible to college students and their households had been within the works because the starting of Mr. Cordray’s tenure. However when the shape was attributable to launch final 12 months, the division was nonetheless making changes.
After lacking deadlines, the company unveiled the brand new type on the finish of 2023, solely to find a dizzying number of bugs and information errors that locked college students out of the applying and spat out incorrect monetary calculations.
By this spring, Mr. Cordray was scrambling to comprise the harm, pulling workers members from throughout the division who had by no means labored on FAFSA in for emergency sprints to look over purposes, and personally main extra time and weekend shifts to attempt to repair the harm, in accordance with recordings of inside discussions obtained by The New York Instances.
The botched launch infuriated schooling advocates who voiced concern that obstacles to making use of for help this 12 months would disproportionately have an effect on essentially the most susceptible college students and will result in decrease enrollment at many smaller schools that have been already going through monetary strain.
By April, Republicans in Congress have been overtly questioning Mr. Cordray’s management, and calling for resignations within the Schooling Division throughout a listening to about FAFSA. Consultants and faculty directors testified then on the hurt the botched rollout induced college students this 12 months.
“If there was a monetary help director or perhaps a faculty president that delayed monetary help on their campus for as much as six months, the skilled worth that will be paid for that will be fairly steep,” Justin Draeger, the president of the Nationwide Affiliation of Scholar Monetary Assist Directors, informed lawmakers on the listening to.
Mr. Cardona, who in public has repeatedly insisted that the simplified type will profit generations of future college students regardless of the woes this 12 months, made no point out of FAFSA in saying Mr. Cordray’s departure.
“We’re grateful for Wealthy Cordray’s three years of service, through which he completed extra transformational modifications to the scholar help system than any of his predecessors,” he stated.
