By Catherine Brown, Senior Director, Policy and Advocacy
Reading time: Three minutes
Aaron Lemon-Strauss, Executive Director, FAFSA Program, and Kiera Mosley-Hobbs, Director, Policy Implementation and Liaison Group, at the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) presented last week at the National College Attainment Network's (NCAN) 2025 National Conference in New Orleans (LA). Their session highlighted the dramatic progress the agency has made in improving Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) functionality and raising completion rates over the last year and previewed some policy updates to come. The full slide deck from their presentation can be downloaded here.
The presentation kicked off with a fun audience quiz of key facts about FAFSA, including:
FAFSA completion rates are up 8.6% compared with last year and 6.1% compared with two years ago.
Oklahoma has seen the biggest percentage growth in submissions this year due to the implementation of universal FAFSA.
The fastest someone filled out a 2025-26 FAFSA was 55 seconds.
The average call center wait time is 12 seconds.
93% of FAFSA filers expressed satisfaction.
About 5,000 FAFSAs have already been processed this cycle (2026-27).
The most popular first name on the 25-26 FAFSA is Ashley.
The presentation also described two recent major changes to increase student success:
Contributor Invitation: The single biggest drop off point in FAFSA completion was the contributor or parent invitation process. FSA has reinvented the process to allow students to simply input an email address for their parent, guardian,
or spouse, eliminating the need for students to know their parents’ Social Security number, date of birth, or email address. Once students enter an email address, contributors will be sent an email with a link and a code. They can either click
on the link in the email or they can enter the code into the FAFSA and be taken directly to the student’s FAFSA where they can complete it.
Automatic Social Security Administration Match (aka “The NCAN fix”): FSA also eliminated the multiple day waiting period for verifying a StudentAid.gov (FSA ID) account, which many NCAN members referred to as a game changer. “FAFSA
completion nights are back,” said FSA staff.
Lemon-Strauss also solicited feedback on how to prioritize additional improvements through a popular NCAA-style bracket game. He proposed seven areas the FSA team could focus on and asked the audience for an additional suggestion. The Final Four included:
clarify confusing terms like SAI (student aid index), notify applicants when they have been flagged for verification, allow for real-time results and corrections, and make post-submission steps clearer. The overwhelming audience favorites were to
notify students when they have been selected for verification (the one crowd sourced suggestion) and offer real-time results and corrections.
The presentation also provided a host of important policy updates. These included:
The FAFSA has already been updated to reflect the changes in budget reconciliation bill to asset reporting and foreign income. No reprocessing or corrections will be needed.
The race/ethnicity categories in question 12 have been aligned with the US Census.
Students correcting 2024-25 or 2025-26 FAFSAs will have to update their response to question 11, which asks about a student’s sex and offers only male and female as answers.
Data sharing rules have been updated to require student consent to share any of the following data: personal circumstances, dependency status, federal benefits received, financial assets, SAI, Pell eligibility status, and verification status.
There will be an upcoming "Dear Colleague" letter that will clarify how Federal Tax Information and FAFSA data may be used concerning:
Application, award, and administration of aid
Research partnerships
FAFSA completion initiative
Means-tested benefits outreach
Aggregate reporting
Students who are unaccompanied or homeless youth must self-report their status if they have a designation from an authorized entity. Otherwise, they will follow the same FAFSA path as a provisionally independent student.
Second Chance Pell programs must submit applications to the US Department of Education (ED) to transition to Prison Education Programs (PEPs) by January 1, 2026 and be approved before July 1, 2026 to continue providing Pell grants.
Resources, product updates, completion data and more from FSA are available here.
Questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out to me, Catherine Brown, at brownc@ncan.org.
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