Setting up a StudentAid.gov account (FSA ID) is often a stumbling block prior to students and contributors attempting to complete a FAFSA. The Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) has made improvements over the last few years to ease this process. Many
of the enhancements in the last two years were focused on contributors who did not have a Social Security number (SSN), which greatly increased access to the FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Recently, Aaron Lemon-Strauss, Executive
Director-FAFSA Program, shared some planned refreshes coming this December for the entire FSA ID account set up process. The changes were developed to:
Make account creation faster and reduce error rates. Currently, the account creation process takes over 10 minutes.
Reduce the abandonment rate. Approximately 12% of users who reach the final verification steps leave the process before completing.
Reduce the volume of calls to the Financial Aid Information Center. Approximately 8,000 calls per month relate to creating studentaid.gov accounts.
Lemon-Strauss has shared the following key changes that are coming:
Reduce the number of required fields from 23 to 12. This change would include removing the challenge questions, the backup code copy information and duplicate entry fields.
Streamline the steps and copy presented, which would shrink the number of pages presented from eight to six.
Verify email and phone numbers as they are entered. Currently this step happens at the end of the process and contributes to the abandonment rate.
For those that wish the information to be presented in Spanish, offer the option at the start of the flow to eliminate any duplicate information needing entered.
FSA should be releasing updated screenshots in the coming weeks. The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) looks forward to these changes to ease the process of setting up an account and providing quicker access for those wishing to complete the
FAFSA. We encourage organizations that develop materials to assist students and families with creating accounts to update their resources once the final changes are made public.
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