By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Four minutes
Admittedly, it’s getting harder and harder to write new, unique, and compelling leads about the 2024-25 “Better FAFSA” cycle. If you’re tired of talking or thinking about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), you will find no respite here,
but hopefully you will find something you are not reading elsewhere: analysis based on the first two months of high school seniors’ FAFSA submission data as displayed in the National College Attainment Network's (NCAN) FAFSA Tracker at the national, state, and local levels.
As of March 1, the most recent data release, class of 2024 seniors have submitted 34.4% fewer FAFSAs year-over-year
(about a 631,000 student difference), and there’s a 16-percentage-point submission rate gap nationally between the classes of 2023 and 2024. NCAN updates our Tracker every Friday when the new data releases.
You will not find additional handwringing about the rollout here; that has been covered thoroughly elsewhere. But I keep getting asked about what I think is happening and what might happen as the weeks go by. Without further ado, some thoughts on this
year’s FAFSA cycle for 2024 seniors.
All in all – we need to be alarmed at what we’re seeing, but catching up to last year is not out of reach. Through March 1, we’re at -34.4% in terms of submissions, which is a 16-percentage point gap.
Through nine weeks (so, first week of December 2022 but March 1 for this cycle), the class of 2024 seniors are ahead about 4.6% year-over-year. This is good, but that number needs to be bigger because the sooner students submit their FAFSAs at this
point the sooner they will get their award letters (we hope), and we’re already in mid-March.
I’m surprised that 4.6% figure is not larger. We should have all of this pent-up demand from students who would’ve submitted in October to December in a “normal year.” I don’t think we’ve really seen the kind of “breaking the dam” level
momentum from this cycle I would have expected after the delayed opening. After all, a cycle’s first three months contain about 50% of the seniors who are going to complete a FAFSA in the first year.
FAFSA cycles tend to lose energy and momentum as they progress. We see the week-to-week number of FAFSAs completed decrease over time, which means that both the percent changes and the increases to the percentage of seniors completing both taper off.
The exception was for the class of 2021, which started out about -15% year-over-year and then had a long, slow trudge back up to -4.8% by June 30. That trudge was motivated, I think, by the release of the COVID-19 vaccine and students’ collective
realization that the fall semester would be more “normal.”
It is possible that the realization this year’s FAFSA now works serves the same role the vaccine did for the class of 2021. As students and families who said “the heck with this” in the early going come back or hear that this FAFSA is, indeed, “better”
in a lot of ways, we will hopefully see the cycle pick up more energy. After all, it is unlikely that huge swaths of the country lost their demand for college-going because of the FAFSA. We still likely have a lot of students who want to matriculate.
As noted above we’re about 16-percentage points behind last year by percentage of seniors submitting. There are about 16 weeks of the cycle to go until June 30. Clawing back one percentage point per week seems like a reasonable target.
We have talked a lot about submissions, which includes FAFSAs with errors, of which we know there are many. We do not know how the process of fixing those errors and converting submissions to completions could go. The submissions numbers we
are seeing could be EXTREMELY soft, which would make for more of a lift; essentially, you’d need students and families with errors to touch the FAFSA twice this cycle.
We’ve still got a lot of state financial aid deadlines to go where we’d normally see big bumps. California on April 2 and Tennessee on April 15 will be potentially big bellwethers.
All in all, the data show us a mixed bag right now. We’re way behind, and we have a long way to go, but truly the race is not over. Now that we’re in March, there needs to be a comprehensive lift from every corner and a consistent message from every
messenger that it is not too late, that the system works well for many students and families, and that there is broader Pell Grant eligibility and larger awards for those who are eligible this year.
Have questions, comments, or responses? I’d love to hear them at debaunb@ncan.org. Interested in more FAFSA resources? Check out our abundant offerings here.
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