In the last year, higher education and efforts to support truly equal access to it have become intensely politicized to the detriment of students and our nation’s future. While I mourn this situation, I am prouder than ever of the National College Attainment
Network (NCAN) and our members nationwide. Time and time again this year, we have stood up for our students, especially students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, students who are first-generation college-goers, immigrant students, and
others who face unfairly high hurdles in completing a postsecondary degree or credential. As we marked the 30th year since NCAN’s founding, we
brought our collective wisdom, strength, and experience to bear to achieve outcomes no single one of us could have achieved alone.
In trying moments, I am reminded of two sustaining facts. First, backlash comes only in response to progress. Second, we are part of a long journey to create a country that fully reflects the founding ideals of liberty and equality for all and out of
many, one. We undertake this work collectively and joyfully, even when it’s difficult, as you see reflected in the photo above of Bottom Line staff at NCAN’s 2024 National Conference.
Despite this year’s many serious challenges, I note two important, hard-won victories.
After the dysfunctional first year of the Better FAFSA technology platform, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) opened for its second year in December 2024 greatly improved. In fact, despite opening two months later than usual, FAFSA completion rates for the high school class of 2025 rebounded to the 2023 level.
This achievement is in large part due to the advocacy and persistence of NCAN members in identifying the Better FAFSA’s many early errors, your recommendations to fix them, and your determination to help students no matter what. Additionally, this
remarkable turnaround sets the stage for the class of 2026 to reach an all-time FAFSA completion high by next summer, thanks to the reduced number of questions, streamlined processes, better user experience, improved technology, and the tremendous
FAFSA awareness and completion support you offer to students.
Second, we protected federal student aid from massive budget cuts proposed by the president and US House of Representatives. Despite the negative political climate for higher education, NCAN helped achieve significant victories in the federal budget reconciliation legislation signed into law on July 4, 2025:
maintaining current maximum Pell Grant credit eligibility requirements,
providing $10.5 billion to avoid cuts to Pell Grant amounts, and
maintaining the subsidized undergraduate federal student loan program.
Once again, NCAN member organizations and students were critical to these victories. Your work to educate policymakers about the vital importance of need-based financial aid helped to protect it while many other federal programs were cut severely. Regrettably,
this legislation makes large reductions to other critical supports for low-income families to provide tax cuts for wealthy Americans and dramatically increases spending on immigration enforcement.
Finally, let’s be clear that despite negative (and often unreliable) survey responses and pessimistic hot takes in the media, data shows us
that students still want college degrees. Fall 2024 enrollment for 18-year-olds was up despite the decrease in FAFSA completions. Common App reported a 13% increase in college applications this year by first-generation students and
an 8% increase by those from ZIP codes below the median income. And graduation rates are up as well: Postsecondary completion rates hit a record high as of the 2023-24 academic year. Again, NCAN members can take a significant share of credit for supporting
students to these new heights.
So let me say an immense thank-you to NCAN member organizations and supporters. We have pulled together this year to respond to almost unthinkable challenges, which will continue in the year ahead. You have told us you rely on NCAN to understand what
news from Washington, DC, to pay attention to and how to respond. We are humbled and honored by your trust and will work to continue to earn it. Below I’m pleased to share additional highlights of 2024-25 below, and please also visit NCAN’s KPI Dashboard to see our progress “by the numbers.” Together, let’s enter the new school year with resolve and faith in our shared vision.
From FAFSA Fiasco to Smoother Sailing
NCAN members and students lived through a swing from highly negative to substantially positive FAFSA experiences during the last 12 months. The disastrous rollout of the 2024-25 FAFSA yielded confusion, wasted time, and far lower than average completion rates, even despite the extraordinary summer 2024 FAFSA completion efforts happening around the country. By August 2024, the high
school class of 2024’s FAFSA completion rate ended down 9.1 percentage points, which represented a recovery compared to the 11.6 percentage point gap at the end of June. NCAN’s emergency national digital #DoTheFAFSA campaign,
which ran from mid-May through August 2024, yielded an estimated 587,028 FAFSA submissions, representing 157% of our goal and a boost to summer completion efforts.
In June 2024, the US Department of Education (ED) brought in a new team to fix the existing FAFSA and work toward a much improved 2025-26 FAFSA. NCAN’s recommendations to and engagement with ED ramped up to help the new ED FAFSA team prioritize the necessary fixes and vet potential solutions. NCAN staff were in frequent contact with ED through the late summer and fall, including consulting on the 2025-26 cycle’s
delayed opening. Several NCAN member organizations partnered with ED to conduct 2025-26 FAFSA beta testing.
After the November 2024 election, the incoming administration’s intended policy to deport as many undocumented individuals as possible represented a significant challenge. NCAN investigated the privacy protections for parents without Social Security numbers
contributing to their student’s FAFSA. Regrettably, we determined that although the Higher Education Act prohibits the use of data for any purpose other than determining and awarding federal financial assistance, NCAN could not assure mixed-status students and families that data submitted to ED as part of the FAFSA process would continue to be protected. We encouraged anyone assisting mixed-status families who were contributing to a FAFSA for the first time, to share the potential
risk and support them in deciding whether to file a FAFSA. This action was without precedent in NCAN history and met with a range of responses. NCAN stands by this guidance today, especially considering recent events related to undocumented individuals
in the US.
FAFSA Drove NCAN’s Communications
Although 2024-25 did not surpass 2023-24 in terms of earned media, throughout the past year, FAFSA continued to drive NCAN’s prominent earned media mentions. NCAN staff spent significant time talking with reporters about FAFSA challenges, workarounds,
completion initiatives, and eventual improvements. The examples below helped to amplify key messages to policymakers, educators, students and families.
A NBC News story focused on the critical importance of sufficient financial
aid to students’ college enrollment decisions.
The Washington Post, USA Today, US News and World Report, NerdWallet, and other outlets covered the news that the 2025-26 FAFSA launch
would also be delayed.
The Washington Post editorial board wrote about the disappointing technological failure of the 2024-25 FAFSA and called on Congress to fix it: “Easing
the FAFSA process is a worthy cause. If the Education Department needs more money to fix the system, lawmakers should find it.”
The Associated Press covered how the botched FAFSA rollout negatively affected students’ enrollment plans.
NPR reported on how late financial aid offers were making fall enrollment challenging for low-income students.
The New York Times wrote about how to handle the delayed launch of the 2025-26 FAFSA.
The Washington Post wrote about the launch of the 2025-26 FAFSA and initial reports that it was significantly improved from 2024-25.
A Teen Vogue story discussed how the botched rollout of the new FAFSA hurt the students it was intended to help most: low-income students.
NCAN members were also prominent in the news about FAFSA.
Denver Scholarship Foundation was quoted in The Colorado Sun about the problems with the new FAFSA.
US News and World Report featured The Institute for College Access and Success in a piece about how to complete FAFSA.
OneGoal talked with Vox about how the national political situation is making students uncertain about affording college.
CBS News interviewed the Southern California College Access Network about how the FAFSA was complicating college acceptances
for high school seniors.
In sum, earned media helped us draw attention to the FAFSA problem, create urgency for ED to address it, and give students, families, and educators key information to keep FAFSA completion rates as high as possible.
Increased Member and Field Engagement
With the dramatic changes in FAFSA and the national policy environment during the last 12 months, the number of NCAN member organizations stayed relatively steady (544 compared to 565 in 2023-24), but we noted increased engagement on several fronts.
2024 NCAN National Conference attendance rose 9% from 2023, higher than our historical 6% annual average increase.
In NCAN’s annual member survey, a historic 93% of respondents reported that “NCAN helped me do my job better.”
Web site visitors were up 7% and reached our highest ever at an average of almost 31,000 unique individuals per month. This is more than double the number of just two years ago.
We upgraded our annual Hill Day in Washington, DC, to a two-day Leadership Summit and Executive Retreat. The event was sold
out and attracted an all-time high of more than 230 members and students. The expanded event gave us the opportunity to speak with policymakers from across the country about the need to provide more federal financial aid to students from low-income
families at this time of rising college costs. Our members practiced how to tell their stories and share the impact that postsecondary education had on their lives. They heard from Congressional staff and policy experts about the current policy
landscape and challenges facing Pell and other higher education funding. The summit was an excellent opportunity to deliver more timely content and create meaningful opportunities for our members to connect with one another more deeply with the
needs and concerns of college access and success leaders at a critical time.
Continuing to deepen NCAN’s engagement with member cohorts was also a top priority. We added a new quarterly virtual peer exchange for CEOs of member organizations in order to better understand their priorities and challenges, especially in the current
anti-equity environment. We upgraded our monthly programming for our existing member councils (thank you, Advisory Task Force, Policy Council,
and State Pathways Partners) to better convey the most promising trends and understand their top concerns. We also launched an online Slack community where NCAN members can quickly ask questions and get answers from other members and NCAN staff. Areas of focus so far are FAFSA completion and policy, data and evaluation, “student-facing” efforts, and a “general” channel.
In terms of subject matter, NCAN led the way in developing, advancing, and sharing resources around a wide variety of topics:
FAFSA completion workarounds and summer FAFSA completion strategies were critical in May-August 2024. NCAN once again launched a suite of resources in December 2024 for those assisting students with
2025-26 FAFSA completion.
We delivered a series of resources on student mental wellness supported by the ECMC Foundation.
NCAN increased understanding of effective partnerships between higher education institutions and community-based college access and success organizations (CBOs), supported by the Scheidel Foundation. NCAN released an analysis of more than 50 CBOs providing college success services and profiles of three CBOs, including Onward We Learn in Rhode Island.
To increase understanding of effective strategies during K-12 years, we supported a group of members in developing and disseminating a framework of enabling conditions at the school district level for achieving better postsecondary outcomes.
Because of NCAN’s strong commitment to increasing use of real-time student-level data, we also held a first-time convening of state-level agencies and nonprofits to explore how states can better deliver postsecondary outcomes data to their school districts.
At the state level, NCAN continued our work with 15 partner organizations to improve K-12-to-postsecondary pathways for students furthest from opportunity. Hot topics have included universal FAFSA and other state-level FAFSA completion strategies, direct
admissions for high school students into college, and effective messaging to students and families to encourage postsecondary application and enrollment. We continued to share with state partner networks and agencies best practice around postsecondary
outcomes data sharing. This effort is particularly timely due to the National Student Clearinghouse’s recent launch of StudentTracker 3.0, which makes it far easier for states and districts
to obtain student-level postsecondary enrollment and completion data. We were delighted that some of NCAN’s state-level work was featured in the May 2025 journal of the National Association of State Boards of Education. This K-12-to-postsecondary pathways work was supported by the Gates Foundation.
NCAN also continued to support the field through several consulting projects. Our Senior Director of Consulting Colette Hadley assisted organizations such as the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Bloch Family Foundation (Kansas City, KS), Battle Creek
(MI) Community Foundation, and the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation with projects ranging from supporting place-based college access networks and the creation of postsecondary community initiatives, to optimizing scholarship programs for equity
and long-term impact.
Protecting Pell and Responding to Policy Uncertainty
The change in presidential administration and Congressional leadership have flipped NCAN’s policy work from advancing policies to increase federal aid for low-income students to defending existing levels. The administration’s attempts to end lawful university
or nonprofit programs that may take a student’s race into consideration also threaten NCAN member organizations and the proven support that many students need to access and complete higher education.
NCAN has responded quickly to this political landscape to help our members understand rumored and actual presidential executive orders, as exemplified by these blog posts:
NCAN’s 2025 Spring Institute theme was “Committed to Belonging and Opportunity” and featured two college presidents and three NCAN member leaders discussing their strategies in the current polarized environment. NCAN also convened calls for members whose
federal grants were terminated or threatened so they could support and learn from one another.
Throughout, NCAN has emphasized the message that the stability of the federal financial aid system is paramount if higher education – our country’s greatest engine of economic and social mobility – is going to function. Additionally, the Pell Grant is
the foundation upon which all other student aid is built, and this funding must remain available. We thank all our members, especially those in several key states, for educating policymakers about the case for federal student aid, which helped protect
the Pell Grant and undergraduate subsidized loan program in the federal budget reconciliation legislation signed on July 4. Informative op-eds or news articles such as in Florida,
Ohio, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Missouri,
Forbes, and TIME focused on the topic of
the key role of Pell Grants in economic growth and their importance to opportunity for first-generation students.
Since January, NCAN has delivered several resources to help our members understand the new federal policy environment:
Our new Federal Policy Action Center centralizes information about the various policy threats and makes it easy to find advocacy resources.
We have increased the frequency of our Rapid Response Policy Team email update from occasional to weekly.
In April, we released our annual “Pell Grants Left on the Table” analysis for the high school class of 2024, emphasizing the funding
that states could access by helping more students complete the FAFSA.
In September we also updated our yearly Growing Gap report on the number of public colleges and universities that are affordable to the average Pell Grant recipient, followed by a deeper dive on
the Great Lakes states, thanks to support from the Joyce Foundation.
A few additional notable achievements on the policy front:
In NCAN’s 2024 member survey, an all-time high of 80% of respondents reported engaging in at least one advocacy activity in the prior year.
NCAN’s Rapid Response Policy Team group of members grew from 248 to 402 this year (62%).
NCAN joined a lawsuit with 14 other nonprofit plaintiffs on behalf of our approximately 50 member organizations
whose AmeriCorps grants were improperly terminated in April. On July 7, the judge granted a preliminary injunction in the case ordering the Corporation for National and Community service to reinstate and restore all AmeriCorps grants, subgrants,
contracts and funding to all NCAN members and other plaintiffs.
NCAN has been cited by several major news outlets regarding the harm the US House reconciliation bill could do through Pell Grant cuts and federal student loan changes, including The Washington Post,
Washington Examiner, NPR,
and NerdWallet.
NCAN’s Key Capacity Wins
In addition to programmatic and policy work, NCAN strives to continuously improve our operations, including finance, HR, technology, and governance. Most importantly, we are pleased to report that NCAN forecasts ending Fiscal Year 2025 with approximately
$194,000 in positive net revenue from a $9.4 million budget, subject to revision in our upcoming annual audit. Below are a few other notable developments.
We gratefully received additional grant support from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, Capital One, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Gates Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, and Trellis Foundation
for various aspects of NCAN’s work.
NCAN said goodbye to five outstanding board members (Steve Colón, Bottom Line; Adam Berg, AEM Corporation; Jamie Sears, UBS Americas; Candy Marshall, TheDream.US; and Dr. Sujuan Boutté, Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance).
With financial support from an anonymous donor, NCAN selected a new association management system (AMS) to replace our current outdated technology and undertook the substantial planning needed to transition in early 2026. The AMS comprises NCAN’s
member relationship management system, web site content management system, and mass email functionality. NCAN members can look forward to a significantly improved technology experience in the new year.
We implemented a new budgeting platform to improve budget tracking and planning and prepared to shift from outsourced to in-house accounting.
We navigated the retirement of longtime NCAN senior staff member MorraLee Keller, and she continued to assist us with FAFSA issue analysis on a part-time basis.
We created a new staff position focused on digital learning and welcomed Molly Rothschild, who is expanding NCAN’s capacity on webinars and e-learning.
On the HR front, NCAN continued staff professional development and inclusion initiatives and implemented new annual and mid-year review processes designed to mitigate potential bias and increase transparency.
Once again, thank you for your support of students and for being part of the NCAN community. In the world’s most diverse nation, providing opportunity and support to students who were historically barred from higher education is essential to our health,
security and long-term prosperity. Especially in a challenging year, we are so much stronger together.
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