Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Services
Reading time: Five minutes
More than two-dozen stakeholders connected with students’ college and career readiness pathways convened in Boise on March 14 for the Gem State’s first-ever statewide FAFSA Summit. The full-day event represented a concerted effort by
the Idaho State Board of Education to identify barriers to FAFSA completion and opportunities for closing historic gaps in performance.
School counselors, admissions staff, college access professionals from community-based organizations, financial aid staff at Idaho colleges and universities, TRIO staff, representatives from the state’s workforce development council, and state GEAR UP
personnel were just some of the more than two dozen attendees.
Idaho is in an interesting place regarding FAFSA completion and postsecondary outcomes writ large. Idaho was the first state with direct admissions and has a robust state-driven
college and career readiness campaign, but unfortunately has ranked in the mid-40s by percentage of high school seniors completing over the past five FAFSA cycles (notably, Idaho is not the only Western state to face FAFSA completion headwinds). In more positive news, FAFSA completions are up 6.5% through early March for the class of 2023,
good for 13th nationally.
NCAN is pleased to be able to partner with the Idaho State Board of Education through the Postsecondary Pathways Project.
Jenni Kimball, College and Career Advising Manager at the State Board, was one of the event’s organizers. Mallory Essman, one of the National College Attainment Network's (NCAN) College and Career Readiness Fellows through the same endeavor, was the event’s other organizer. I was honored to be asked to present at the Summit on FAFSA completion trends in Idaho and beyond and to share some insights about what other states are trying to do to drive FAFSA completion.
The Summit’s agenda likely provides a good model for other states out there who are interested in hosting a similar event:
8:00 - 8:30 AM: Light Breakfast and Check-in
8:30 - 9:00 AM: Welcome & Introductions
9:00 - 10:00 AM: Presentation: "FAFSA Completion in Idaho" by Bill DeBaun, NCAN
10:00 - 10:15 AM: Break
10:15 - 10:45 AM: Debrief and Discussion
10:45 AM - 12:00 PM: Asset Mapping
12:00 - 12:45 PM: Lunch
12:45 - 2:00 PM: Barriers, Gaps, and Opportunities
2:00 - 2:15 PM: Break
2:15 - 2:45 PM: Working-Group Action Plan and Next Steps
2:45 - 3:00 PM: Wrap Up and Closing
I put this agenda here because, to be very clear, I think states should be interested in hosting a similar event. The energy in the room, the exchange (and generation) of new ideas, and the obvious relationship-building that occurred over the course
of seven hours strikes me as invaluable for Idaho’s college and career readiness ecosystem, and I expect this event to pay dividends down the line. Developing this kind of connective tissue between stakeholders from the K12, higher education, and
nonprofit sectors is at the heart of the systems change work NCAN is engaged in via our strategic plan, and it was wonderful to see an in-person version of it in practice.
The debrief on the data I presented asked each table to consider and discuss their reactions to the data as well as questions about and opportunities for increasing FAFSA completion. This was interesting and opened up the conversation to larger discussions
about the root causes of FAFSA completion difficulties in Idaho, the implications of the forthcoming Better FAFSA, and more.
The asset mapping is the point at which the Summit really turned tactical: what did the assembled stakeholders think were the available resources that contributed to FAFSA completion? The team used Slido to create an interactive word cloud and then spent much of the rest of this session exploring the implications of those resources. This is an important piece for most states to undertake, not just to name the different resources students use for FAFSA
completion but also to understand the connections between them. Indeed, those connections were a key theme for the Summit generally.
The post-lunch session focused on barriers, gaps, and opportunities for FAFSA completion. Admittedly, by the time Jenni Kimball hit the 3rd sheet of oversized Post-It notes full of barriers, it was starting to feel a little grim. There are a lot of things
that can derail students’ FAFSA completion progress! But attendees did a great job identifying the full range of challenges, from the micro: “they don’t understand grant aid” to the macro: “families don’t trust the federal government.” A valuable
exercise in this segment was to ask attendees to identify which challenges they felt were in their collective locus of control. After all, some challenges are addressable by practice. Some are going to feel more unconquerable no matter the approach.
The last segment of the day was also the most tactical. Gathering suggestions for practices and next steps from across the day, the Summit’s organizers asked attendees to vote for their two most valuable next steps by arranging jumbo Post-It’s around
the room. The four action items receiving the most votes were:
Coordinating a statewide FAFSA completion task force.
Organizing a statewide calendar of FAFSA completion events to cover school districts, postsecondary institutions, and other venues.
Developing a common financial aid presentation to be used statewide to ensure consistency of messaging across students and families.
Creating a statewide FAFSA toolkit, a la Tennessee’s FAFSA Frenzy, to give district and school professionals a sense of how to run a FAFSA completion event and other facets of successful FAFSA completion campaigns.
To be frank, the Summit was one of the more edifying events in my time at NCAN. My descriptions above aren’t going to come close to doing justice to the richness of the conversations participants conducted and particularly not to the richness of the developing
empathy in the conversations. To see colleges’ financial aid staff, for example, understanding the difficulties in helping students work through FAFSA verification, or to see college access program and college staff conversing about how they can better
balance the burden to make sure more students’ needs are met. When NCAN talks about building relationships and trust between different sectors, these are exactly the kinds of conversations we mean.
I’m walking away from Idaho’s FAFSA Summit deeply convinced that every state should have one. Not just to talk about FAFSA completion, because indeed FAFSA completion should not be any state’s end-all, be-all goal, but to try to bridge the silos that
have long-plagued the college access field. The kinds of connections you create sitting across a table are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to build across Zoom or email. The cost and time involved both increase with an in-person event like
this. So, too, I feel could be the benefits that justify them.
Want to have or explore a similar FAFSA Summit in your state? I’d love to have that conversation and connect you to more who would, too. Reach out to me at debaunb@ncan.org!
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