Top Education Department official steps down amid crisis over college financial aid

The top Biden administration official in charge of administering federal college financial aid has resigned, the Education Department said Friday, capping off a year of turmoil for students and universities.

Richard Cordray, the chief operating officer for Federal Student Aid, will step down at the end of June, officials said. The former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Cordray faced mounting criticism from congressional Republicans to leave his post amid calamitous delays in the college financial aid process.

In a statement to USA TODAY, Cordray said his office has achieved key milestones in his three-year term. He has agreed to stay on for an interim transition period.

"Over my tenure, we provided student loan forgiveness to more than 4,000,000 borrowers and their families; made it easier for people to apply for and manage federal student aid; and took strong actions to hold schools accountable for defrauding students," Cordray said.

Cordray's departure comes as scores of high school seniors across the country await aid offers they typically would have received by now. Repeated glitches and errors in the rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, truncated the decision-making timelines for hundreds of thousands of students. College officials have scrambled to get aid offers out the door, sometimes using inaccurate information to make crucial calculations about how much families should expect to pay for college in the fall.

The FAFSA blunders haven’t let up. Now the Education Department has a credibility issue.

Congress mandated that the form be simplified, a bipartisan effort that Republicans and Democrats agreed was long overdue. But the Education Department's implementation of the new FAFSA this year was beset with problems, eroding trust between the federal government, higher education institutions, students and their families.

Cordray was at the forefront. His most recent publicly available performance contract indicated that his top priority on the job was implementing the new FAFSA. Republicans, and some former Education Department officials, say he lost sight of that goal and focused too much on student loan relief efforts instead.

In a statement Friday, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona praised Cordray for "fixing the broken student loan system." He did not specifically mention Cordray's role in the FAFSA rollout.

"It's no exaggeration to say that Rich helped change millions of lives for the better," Cardona said.

Contributing: Swapna Venugopal, USA TODAY

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Amid FAFSA crisis, Federal Student Aid chief Richard Cordray steps down