The 2024-25 FAFSA is, at long (long, long…long) last open, and students and families are in the process of completing it. The “Better FAFSA” will expand Pell Grant eligibility, increase Pell Grant awards, and streamline the FAFSA completion process for
many students and families. Unfortunately, the massive revamp of Federal Student Aid’s front- and back-end systems demand a delayed opening for this year’s FAFSA, which opened at the end of December.
The National College Attainment Network (NCAN), our members, and our partner organizations across the country have been preparing for this moment for more than a year, and now it’s time
to see the fruits of our labor: the number of students around the country completing the FAFSA.
There’s just one problem: thedatawe’d normally use to track FAFSA completion are also delayed.
Since 2018, NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker has measured high school seniors’ FAFSA completions at the national, state, and local levels using publicly-available high school-level data from the
Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) that is released on a weekly basis. FSA’s December 15 electronic announcement noted, “For state aid agencies and college access partners, as a result of the phased implementation of the 2024-25 FAFSA process, detailed school level data on FAFSA completions will not be available until April 2024.”
Notably and critically: this delay only applies to the publicly released school-level data set. States will begin to receive the student-level FAFSA completion data they use to populate student-level portals for districts and schools as soon as FAFSAs start getting processed at the end of January.
This delay to the public school-level file concerns NCAN, and should concern others, because in the past these data have been valuable for understanding where to triage supports to districts and schools, monitoring how the FAFSA completion cycle is going,
and reporting as a matter of public accountability.
NCAN will begin to populate our FAFSA Tracker as soon as data from FSA is released, but until then we will be trying to piece the puzzle together using school-level data shared with us from states. If your state is interested, able, and willing in sharing data with NCAN to populate the Tracker this spring, please reach out to me at debaunb@ncan.org. States may also have their own dashboards that practitioners, policymakers, and the public to consider, and these dashboards could be populated with aggregated FAFSA completion data before the public file is
released.
The FAFSA Tracker has been a valuable resource for the past six FAFSA completion cycles and will continue to be one in the future. This hiccup related to the Better FAFSA is a temporary one, and the Tracker will be back up and running as soon as possible.
Until then, NCAN will get creative about how to get a picture of FAFSA completion based on data releases and sharing from individual states.
Have questions, comments, or concerns? I’d love to hear from you at debaunb@ncan.org.
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