By Raymond AlQaisi, Senior Manager of Policy and Advocacy
Reading time: 3 min.
This week, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) announced that – effective immediately – it will ease the
verification process for the 2022-23 award year Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Streamlining the verification process to focus solely on identity theft and fraud will provide necessary relief to students and aid administrators for
the remainder of the current FAFSA cycle.
Verification is an audit-like process that requires students to provide additional documentation to prove the accuracy of information on their FAFSA. This newly announced update eliminates the need for financial verification (V1 category), which requires
students to validate income and tax information. Now, the process will only focus on identity theft and fraud (V4 and V5 categories).
Students selected for verification who have not yet completed the process will not need to do so (assuming no conflicting information is present). NCAN strongly recommends that students who are in the midst of the verification process immediately contact their financial aid office.
After learning about this positive development for students, NCAN CEO Kim Cook offered the following response:
"NCAN appreciates the Department of Education’s effort to streamline FAFSA verification for the remainder of the 2022-23 application cycle. As the COVID pandemic continues to create challenges for prospective and current college students, we must do all we can to reduce barriers to college access.
"As of the end of March, FAFSA applications for the 2022-23 cycle were down 8.9% year-over-year. More specifically, FAFSA renewals from currently enrolled college students declined 12.3%, and renewals from Pell Grant-eligible students – students with low incomes – plummeted by 15.6%. We hope to see these trends reverse as news of the verification relief spreads.
"The impact of verification relief extends beyond securing financial aid. It also allows our advisers and school counselors to spend more of their time on outreach and support to help students stay on track for their postsecondary goals."
ED estimates these changes will help roughly 100,000 students access financial aid and enroll in or continue their postsecondary educations. Given the continuing concerns about COVID’s effects on postsecondary enrollment and persistence, particularly
among students who are economically disadvantaged and students of color, changing the trajectory for as many students as possible is paramount. Reducing the burden of FAFSA verification for students will help in this effort.
NCAN has asked ED to keep verification’s burden to a minimum while maintaining federal student aid program integrity.
As ED monitors the effects of this latest round of verification relief, the department may glean insight into how it can improve verification permanently. Given the upcoming implementation of the FUTURE Act of 2019 and the FAFSA Simplification Act of 2020,
we anticipate the FAFSA process will be greatly improved, reducing the need for verification.
Institutions retain the choice to select students for verification according to their own policies, as pointed out in guidance published by ED. NCAN amplifies the encouragement in the Dear Colleague letter for colleges and universities "to consider amending such policies to limit selection in a manner that offers relief to students and families during the ongoing national emergency."
NCAN and our members know students have faced significant economic, health, and other challenges in this and recent FAFSA cycles. Verification relief should allow tens of thousands of students to more easily access the financial aid for which they are
eligible to help them pursue their educational goals. Further, we hope this opportunity will allow ED to evaluate how verification is conducted, with the goal of eliminating "verification melt"
from the list of challenges our college access and success field must address.
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