Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives
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After two years of gloomy news around FAFSA completion and college enrollment, the high school class of 2022 finally provides us with some encouragement. Through July 1, high school FAFSA completions are up 4.6% year-over-year, representing roughly 92,000
additional applications. The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) estimates that about 52.1% of the senior class completed a FAFSA, exceeding the classes of 2020 and 2021 but falling short of the pre-pandemic class of 2019’s FAFSA completion rate at the same time (53.8%).
These data come from NCAN’s Form Your Future FAFSA Tracker, which has tracked FAFSA completion data for the past five cycles and is updated weekly with data at the national, state,
city, district, and school levels.
The end of June is an important milestone for understanding a high school graduating class’s progress toward FAFSA completion. The data in this blog post focus on data from Federal Student Aid for completions
through July 1, 2022. Using 12th grade enrollment data from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), NCAN estimates that about 52.1% of the class of 2022 completed a FAFSA, compared to about 49.8% of the class of 2021, 51.3% of the class of 2020, and 53.8% of the class of 2019.
(Note that because of a change in enrollment estimates that better accounts for high schools retaining and graduating students, previous NCAN estimates of senior class FAFSA completion enrollment may not align with the figures in this post. For more see
“Updates to the FAFSA Tracker” here.)
The class of 2022’s FAFSA completion increases were driven by strong year-over-year gains from low-income public schools (+9.1% year-over-year), where more than half of students are eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, and high-minority public schools
(+9.0%), where more than 40% of students are Black or Latino/a. Both high school segments experienced FAFSA completion declines in the previous two cycles.
Year-over-year gains were widespread across states in this cycle. Just 11 states had fewer FAFSA completions this year than last. New Mexico (+7.6%), California (+6.6%), and Mississippi (+6.3%) had particularly strong year-over-year improvements, but
these were relatively small next to those experienced by Texas and Alabama, which implemented universal FAFSA policies for the first time this academic year. Both of these states
saw considerable movement in their FAFSA completion outcomes as a result.
Texas’s FAFSA completion rose 25.9% year-over-year (+49,072 completions), which ranks the state first nationally in terms of percent change. Not far behind and ranked second, Alabama had 6,326 more FAFSA completions this year than last, a 24.9% increase.
Both states skyrocketed up the ranking of percent of seniors completing a FAFSA; Texas jumped from 23rd last year to 5th for the class of 2022. Alabama rose 25 places from 34th to 9th.
The chart below, which puts the percentage of seniors completing along the X-axis and year-over-year percent change on the Y-axis, shows exactly how far from its peers Texas and Alabama were this cycle.
The percent of seniors completing leaderboard has some familiar states at its top. For the fifth year running, Louisiana and Tennessee had the highest percentages of seniors completing a FAFSA (note that for the class of 2020 the order was reversed with
Tennessee taking the top spot). Washington, DC and Illinois are again 3rd and 4th by this metric, and the aforementioned Texas rounds out the top five. Notably, all four states with universal FAFSA policies implemented are in the top 10 states by
percent of seniors completing a FAFSA.
Worth noting in the state-level estimates above is that they are, indeed, estimates. Federal Student Aid’s high school FAFSA completion data is an excellent resource, but we do not capture all FAFSA completions through using it. For example, FSA suppresses
high schools with fewer than five FAFSA completions, and these do not appear in our estimates. Additionally, student age and first-time FAFSA filing status are proxies for high school senior status in the FSA data. Additionally, we are using projections for the headcount of high school seniors by state. All of this is to urge caution in comparing small differences
between states’ outcomes; a state’s relative position in the ranking of seniors completing and percent change is likely a better indicator of its performance than the absolute estimates of either of those metrics.
This good news about the class of 2022 stands in stark contrast to the most recent data available about overall and renewal
FAFSA applications. That data, which is only available through March 31, showed that overall FAFSA applications for the 2022-23 academic year were down nearly 9% while renewals were down more than 12% year-over-year and Pell Grant-eligible renewals
by nearly 16%. Beyond FAFSA data, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s reports related to postsecondary enrollment, both overall and for high school seniors specifically,
have also demonstrated substantial declines over the course of the pandemic. NCAN anticipates an update to these data at some point this summer.
Whether the high school class of 2022 can begin to reverse the dismal trends observed over the past two years remains to be seen. Given the tight association between FAFSA completion and enrollment, it’s reasonable to expect the class of 2022’s postsecondary
outcomes to rebound relative to its peers. Until then, NCAN will continue to track and report on FAFSA completion data over the summer via the FAFSA Tracker.
Previous blog posts related to the June 30 FAFSA completion outcomes for the classes of 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 are available at NCAN.org. Note that post hoc data releases in subsequent years may cause slight disparities in the figures reported across years.
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