Hundreds of thousands of financial aid applications need to be fixed after latest calculation error

The U.S. Education Department says it 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 blunder that follows a series of others and threatens further delays to this year’s college applications. The department says a vendor incorrectly calculated a financial aid formula for more than 200,000 students. 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. It’s unlikely that many students, if any, received the incorrect financial aid offers.