The Latest FAFSA Form is Available. It Works Fine.

Last year, in a fit of masochism, I tried to become the first person in the United States to fill out a FAFSA (short for Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form at the precise moment the Department of Education unveiled a long-delayed overhaul.

I failed in my New Year’s Eve quest because the site wasn’t working, and the experience was a harbinger for millions of others. The rollout of the new FAFSA was one of the most epic digital fiascos of our time, right up there with the Obamacare website’s disastrous debut and the Equifax breach.

For several months, many of the most vulnerable teenagers — people with an undocumented parent or others without a Social Security number, or students whose parents didn’t speak English and made data entry errors that they then could not immediately fix — were frozen in place, unable to determine whether they qualified for the grants and loans that could make college affordable. At one school’s FAFSA completion event, only 20 percent of students finished.

This week, the department tried again, opening the gates to the FAFSA website after months of additional revisions and multiple rounds of beta testing.

It’s safe. Go ahead and fill yours out. I got through my part of the form in under 20 minutes. Importing tax information from the Internal Revenue Service was so fast that I was sure I had done it wrong. My daughter did her part in about 10 minutes. She received our results, the so-called Student Aid Index figure, right afterward.

We’re not the people anyone should worry about, though, given our citizenship, permanent address and up-to-date income tax filings.