By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Three minutes
The number of Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) completions for high school seniors was down 40% through March 29, and only about 27% of the class of 2024 has completed a FAFSA compared to 45.5% of the class of 2023 through the same date last year. These figures come from new data from the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA), released last
Friday, which for the first time includes high school seniors’ completions, not just submissions, for the 2024-25 award year.
Throughout this article, it is critical to note the distinction between FAFSA submissions and completions. FAFSA submissions include those applications with errors that will need to be corrected by students and/or contributors to
be processed. FAFSA completions are all those applications without errors that have been processed. As FSA notes, “Completed applications, therefore,
are a subset of all submitted applications.”
In previous years, FAFSA submissions have been about 7% larger than FAFSA completions. This year, through March 29, FAFSA submissions are a whopping 30% larger than completions. This is likely due to students and contributors still being unable to make
corrections to their submitted FAFSAs. This puts a figure on National College Attainment Network (NCAN) members’ experiences of technical challenges that have resulted in, for example, FAFSAs being submitted without signatures, which is an error that
will need to be corrected subsequently before processing can occur. Once corrections are open, we should see that 30% margin between submissions and completions begin to close as the data reflects the corrections.
FAFSA submissions through March 29 show a 27% decline. About 35% of the class of 2024 has submitted a FAFSA through date compared to 49% last year.
NCAN's FAFSA Tracker currently displays data for FAFSA submissions but will switch over to reflect completions on the next update, currently scheduled for this Friday, April 12, to reflect FAFSA data through April 5. NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker visualizes high school seniors’ progress on the FAFSA at the national, state, and local levels and is a valuable way to monitor trends both within and across FAFSA cycles.
The new FAFSA completion data tell a story of a bad situation being worse than it actually looks. Being nearly 19 percentage points behind last year’s national FAFSA completion rate with 12 Fridays until June 30 presents an even taller order for advocates
and practitioners across the country than it looked like a week ago.
Given the connection between FAFSA completion and enrollment, these data are a harbinger
of bad things to come, although how bad remains to be seen. The high school classes of 2020 and 2021 saw their June 30 FAFSA completion rates decline by about two percentage points from the year before, and the immediate college enrollment rates for
those classes subsequently declined significantly. The class of 2024 is currently on-track to finish about 10 percentage points behind the class of 2023.
NCAN is calling onall philanthropic and corporate funders to consider expedited grants to help school districts and college access organizations to hire additional summer staff who can help students and families create FSA IDs, submit the FAFSA, make corrections to their FAFSA, and interpret their financial aid offers, in addition to providing the usual summer melt services. Even a gift as low as $10,000 could help provide one additional summer FAFSA staffer, and those who can give more generously should do so, especially in larger cities and metro areas.
As I wrote in Inside Higher Education last month: “There’s still time to help students who
have yet to submit the FAFSA, but the window is closing, and it’s closing quickly….The alarm bells ringing aren’t hyperbole; they’re reality.” Stay tuned to NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker as we continue to monitor this year’s FAFSA completion cycle.
Have questions or concerns about the data? Reach out to me at debaunb@ncan.org.
Email to a Friend
