The number of first-year students on America’s college campuses dropped five percent this fall, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s new enrollment estimates. The drop—which reverses last year’s four percent increase in freshman enrollment—is directly attributable to the Education Department’s bungled launch of a new financial aid application form, which prevented hundreds of thousands of students from accessing the aid they needed to attend college.

The collapse in enrollment is concentrated among schools serving large numbers of low-income students. At four-year colleges with high proportions of students who qualify for the Pell Grant, a means-tested financial aid award, freshman enrollment dropped more than 10 percent.

Large enrollment losses at four-year colleges were tempered by smaller drops at public community colleges. A researcher at the Clearinghouse suggested that this might be due to some students being unable to afford more expensive four-year colleges due to the financial aid debacle, and opting for cheaper two-year schools instead. This could lead to problems down the road, as two-year colleges have far lower graduation rates than their four-year counterparts.

The Clearinghouse’s numbers are preliminary and could be revised up or down as the semester goes on. But the overall conclusion—a significant drop in enrollment—is unlikely to change.

The seeds of this fall’s freshman enrollment plunge were planted years ago, when the Education Department neglected its congressional mandate to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The Department launched the supposedly simplified form three months late, and the new FAFSA was full of technical glitches and errors that prevented many students from completing it at all. Three-quarters of calls to the Department’s FAFSA help center went unanswered, according to a watchdog report.

As a result, the number of high school seniors and other first-time financial aid applicants completing the FAFSA for the current year dropped by 325,000—a nine percent decline. Low- and middle-income students, who typically rely on Pell Grants to pay for college, accounted for the bulk of the drop.

Reporting suggests that senior officials at the Education Department saw the FAFSA launch as an afterthought, while higher-profile initiatives such as student loan cancellation drew most of their attention. The head of the Office of Federal Student Aid at the time, Richard Cordray, was a darling of progressive advocacy groups gunning for loan forgiveness—but he had no experience in financial aid administration.

Now, the chickens have come home to roost. Hundreds of thousands of students are not attending college because of the Biden administration’s misplaced priorities. The problems are likely to continue: the Education Department will miss the launch deadline for next year’s FAFSA by at least two months, and it’s unclear whether the agency will resolve the form’s many problems by then. Unfortunately, the pain may not be over for America’s prospective college students.