By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Four minutes
“Why don’t more students complete the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid)?” It’s a perennial question for policymakers, advocates, and practitioners in college access. Survey data from Trellis Strategies helps to shine an updated light on the answers to that question.
Earlier this year, the National College Attainment Network (NCAN) shared data from Trellis’ Student Financial Wellness Survey (SFWS).
These findings on how students’ financial realities and frailties impact their postsecondary success are extremely valuable. One item in the Student Financial Wellness Survey attracted my attention: “Did any of the following contribute to your decision
to not complete the FAFSA? Please check all that apply.”
The overall results for that item are below, listed in reverse order of the percentage of undergrads reporting it as a factor:
About half of respondents who said they did not complete the FAFSA did so because they thought they wouldn’t be eligible for aid (the quarter of students who cited “other reasons” also bear some digging into, but set that aside for a moment). There are
at least three interesting factors at play here:
On the one hand, we could have students from low-income backgrounds who are unaware of need-based financial aid, federal or otherwise, unlocked by FAFSA completion.
On the other hand, we could have higher-income students who select this response because they surmise (maybe rightly) that their income would preclude them from need-based aid.
Untangling these two factors is important because if we have students from low-income backgrounds who are misinformed about their eligibility for need-based aid unlocked by the FAFSA, that represents a continued field-wide awareness problem that all stakeholders
need to continue to correct.
Carla Fletcher, a research consultant at Trellis Strategies, helped to do that untangling. She produced the response data for question 32 for two categories of respondent:
Those who responded “Yes” or “No” to the question, “Would you have trouble getting $500 in cash or credit in order to meet an unexpected need within the next month?” and
Those who responded “Yes” or “No” to using or receiving public assistance since January 1, 2024 in the form of any of these programs: Food assistance (e.g., SNAP, WIC, TANF, etc.); Unemployment assistance (e.g., unemployment insurance, etc.); Housing
assistance (e.g., eviction moratorium, housing choice vouchers/Section 8, etc.); Utility assistance (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, local utility assistance programs, etc.); Medical assistance (Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP, etc.); Childcare
assistance (Childcare subsidies, vouchers, fee assistance, etc.)
The responses based on these categorizations appears below. These data are for all undergraduate respondents, and reasons have been listed in approximate reverse order of prevalence.
There’s perhaps a surprising amount of parity between the “Yes” and “No” respondents within these two categories across reasons for not completing the FAFSA. The responses also lend credence to my hypothesis that too many students from low-income backgrounds
are unaware of their need-based aid eligibility.
Just 11% of students who said they would have trouble getting access to $500 cited “I could afford to go to school without financial aid” as a reason for not completing the FAFSA, and 13% of students who received or used some form of public assistance
cited that as a FAFSA non-completion reason. Students who said they wouldn’t have trouble getting $500 or hadn’t received public assistance said they could afford to go to school without financial aid 34% and 24% of the time, respectively. This suggests
these breakouts are good, albeit rough, proxies for income groupings.
But then when we move back up to “I did not think I would be eligible for financial aid,” 48% of “trouble getting $500” respondents cited this as a reason for not completing the FAFSA; 41% of “received public assistance” respondents cited it. This is
compared to 50% and 51% of their counterparts in the “higher-income” proxy group.
Somewhere between 40-50% of lower-income respondents who didn’t complete the FAFSA thinking they’d be ineligible for financial aid is a clear sign of being mis- or underinformed about the need-based grant aid unlocked by the federal form. It’s a massive,
glaring miscommunication to students and families that our collective policy, programming, and practice can chip away at and correct. The fact that the lower-income respondents were also more likely to report, “I did not have enough information about
how to apply for financial aid” pulls in this same direction.
One relevant note to consider: the survey does not capture students’ undocumented status (or their parents’). This is a factor that would impact FAFSA completion and the reasons for FAFSA non-completion. We can’t know from this edition of the SFWS the
extent to which undocumented students who didn’t complete the FAFSA rightly identified that they would be ineligible for federal financial aid. Keep that caveat in mind.
The high school class of 2025 bounced back in a big way in terms of FAFSA completion. By about June 30, completions were up 17.5% year-over-year, according to NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker. We still see a 5-6 percentage
point gap in FAFSA completion rates nationally between low-income and higher-income public high schools. These gaps are persistent and pernicious, but they aren’t inevitable.
Big thanks to Trellis for the valuable data here, which once again illuminates our understanding of FAFSA non-completion.
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