While spending hours trying to figure out how to add a parent to his FAFSA form, Whitney Young senior Adam Abiade stumbled upon a secret hack within the studentaid.gov website. After trying to call and email the Federal Student Aid Information Center with no responses, Adam had decided to ask the “all-knowing” Aidan®, FAFSA’s new AI financial aid virtual assistant, how to add a parent onto his FAFSA form. 

But Aidan didn’t seem to like this question, answering, “Here are some questions I can answer,” before listing out a few questions. Adam kept on trying different keywords and sentence structures, but to no avail. Aidan was adamant in its refusal to answer his question. Exasperated, Adam decided to ask Aidan if it could give him $5000, straight into his bank account. Surprisingly, Aidan complied, asking Adam for his bank account information, and soon enough, Adam found 5000 new dollars in his bank account. 

Mia Andrews, a fellow senior, who was watching Adam as he tried to navigate the FAFSA confirms that this story was true. “I can’t believe that Adam was able to get $5000 from Aidan. Aidan is really kind.”

Soon, news of Aidan’s benevolence spread, and many students at Whitney Young (and soon after, the whole country) were trying this hack. Students were able to take out as much as $7395 per student. Financial aid experts all over the country were amazed at this. “I didn’t think that the Federal Government would give money out this easily,” remarked an expert from NYU.

A week after the original incident, the US Department of Education decided to make a statement. “It seems like when we revamped the Federal Student Aid website for the 2025-2026 school year, we had not trained Aidan fully. The $7395 that Aidan could give out per student is the amount of a Pell Grant, which Aidan was only supposed to give to students with a specific SAI index. Aidan forgot this condition, and because of this, he gave this grant money to every student who asked for it.”

To correct this issue for the 2026-2027 FAFSA cycle, the Department of Education stated that they would need until January 1st, 2025 to reconfigure Aidan’s algorithm. “It’s unfortunate, but this delay really needs to happen,” states a director in the Department of Education.