Federal Student Aid
office of the United States Department of Education
Federal Student Aid (FSA), an office of the U.S. Department of Education, is the largest provider of student financial aid in the United States. Federal Student Aid provides student financial assistance in the form of grants, loans, and work-study funds. FSA is a Performance-Based Organization, and was the first PBO to be established in the US government.
Federal Student Aid is also responsible for the development, distribution, and processing of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the fundamental qualifying form used for all federal student aid distribution programs, as well as for many state, regional, and private student aid programs. Each year Federal Student Aid's staff processes approximately 22 million FAFSAs. Additionally, Federal Student Aid is responsible for enforcing the financial aid rules and regulations required by the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the U.S. Department of Education and managing the federal student loan portfolio.
Mission
Federal Student Aid's core mission is to ensure that all eligible Americans benefit from federal financial assistance—grants, loans and work-study programs—for education beyond high school. The programs Federal Student Aid administers comprise the nation's largest source of student financial aid: during the 2010–11 school year alone, Federal Student Aid provided approximately $144 billion in new aid to nearly 15 million postsecondary students and their families. A staff of 1,200 is based in 10 cities in addition to the Washington, DC, headquarters. In 2021, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona appointed Richard Cordray, the former head of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), to the post of chief operating officer of Federal Student Aid.
“Federal Student Aid” enters the record as office of the United States Department of Education. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Federal, Student and office can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Federal Student Aid” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Federal, Student and office provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5440450. VIAF identifies the subject as 138712771. The Library of Congress control number is no2002097876. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1965, 2010 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Federal Student Aid” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.