ST. LOUIS — The University of Missouri is giving current and prospective students more time to make their final decisions for the upcoming school year.
The university system on Thursday announced it will extend its enrollment deadline to May 15 "to give prospective students and their families more time to review their financial aid offers and make college decisions." It comes after a major overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) program resulted in delays and other issues for the upcoming school year.
Enrollment deadlines, also known as confirmation or deposit deadlines, are the last day incoming students can cancel their enrollment and get a full refund of applicable enrollment fees. The deadline typically falls on May 1 for the University of Missouri system, the announcement said.
The application process typically opens on Oct. 1, but the update that was meant to simplify the form took months longer than expected, resulting in the application process opening in December.
On March 22, the U.S. Education Department said it has discovered a calculation error in hundreds of thousands of student financial aid applications sent to colleges this month and will need to reprocess them.
A vendor working for the federal government incorrectly calculated a financial aid formula for more than 200,000 students, the department said. According to reporting from the Associated Press, the information was sent to colleges to help them prepare financial aid packages but now needs to be recalculated — even as the department works through a backlog of more than 4 million other financial aid applications.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.