The U.S. Department of Education announced yesterday in a that the 2025-26 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) will open for a limited set of students and institutions on Oct. 1, and then the department will make the application available to all students on or before Dec. 1.

The department continues to try and ensure students have access to the maximum federal financial aid possible to reach their education goals, according to the release, and leaders are promising both a better product and smoother process.

The “Better FAFSA” launched earlier this year amid multiple glitches and delays, causing enormous stress for students and families who need help paying for college.

In North Carolina, help for the 2024-25 school year is still available for incoming freshmen, current college students, and adult learners via phone call, email, or in-person. We need you to spread the word as time is running out for college-bound students to complete the FAFSA, with the Aug. 15 priority date looming for those who may qualify for the state’s .

What we know about the 2025-26 FAFSA

According to the , on Oct. 1, the department will invite volunteers to participate in the testing period, and over time will make the form available to an increasing number of participants, starting with hundreds and expanding to tens of thousands of applicants. This process will allow the department to test and resolve issues before making the form available to all students and contributors by Dec. 1.

In the coming weeks, the department will release more information about how this testing period will work.

“Following a challenging 2024-25 FAFSA cycle, the Department listened carefully to the input of students, families, and higher education institutions, made substantial changes to leadership and operations at Federal Student Aid, and is taking a new approach this year that will significantly improve the FAFSA experience,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “Thanks to the partnership of our stakeholders, we’ve developed a better implementation process for 2025-26. I look forward to continuing to work with our partners to ensure this school year’s FAFSA implementation better serves our nation’s students.”

“We’ve heard from students, families, higher education professionals and other stakeholders loud and clear: They want a better, simpler FAFSA process, and they want to know when they can reliably expect it,” said FAFSA Executive Advisor Jeremy Singer. “In close collaboration with partners, Federal Student Aid is confident we will deliver not only a better product, but also a smoother process than last year. One that makes higher education more accessible and within reach for more Americans.”

The department hopes that regular updates during the testing period will boost confidence among students and families, institutions, state agencies, and other partners and stakeholders.

A new, formal request for feedback will be released next week by the department, and it intends to publish a new roadmap with additional tools for students and families, counselors, institutions, and other partners planning for a successful 2025-26 FAFSA season.

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Fewer California high school seniors are completing federal financial aid applications than in past years, which some analysts say is a sign that students may fear the Trump administration will use their sensitive data for immigration enforcement.

The number of seniors completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, has dropped by about 48,000 students, or 25%, as of last week, compared to this point last year. In both years, the California deadline for state financial aid — such as waivers to fully cover tuition at public universities plus other awards — is early March.

Also down dramatically is the share of students applying who have at least one parent who’s undocumented: That number has plunged 44% so far this year compared to this point last year — from about 30,000 students then to 17,000 now.

The  from the California Student Aid Commission, the state agency that handles financial aid. This morning the commission  with high school counselors regarding the implications of this decline and how to encourage more students to apply for aid. 

The Trump administration has not announced plans to use application information to target people for deportation.

“This is very alarming,” said Daisy Gonzales, executive director of the commission, in an interview about the application declines. “It’s a crisis in the sense that we have a perfect storm.” The White House’s , the fires in Southern California that displaced thousands of families and  plus students’  are all forces that Gonzales says may be behind the drop. 

If the trend of fewer applications holds, she fears that “we’re losing another generation of students who should be enrolling, who should be succeeding.”

The commission has extended the deadline for state aid  for students in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, where much of the destructive winter fires occurred.  

California and FAFSA issues aren’t new

College aid experts warned last fall that families with undocumented members living in the U.S. were questioning the safety of the data. Leading associations of college advisors told students to  to protect their loved ones. While current law limits student and family information entered in the application for only financial aid purposes, legal experts told CalMatters under a presidency like Donald Trump’s. Some students with undocumented parents are specifically suspicious of a line in the application for parents asking them if  and a prompt to complete an identity verification form.

Gonzales has attended financial aid fairs the commission sponsors and heard from families about their FAFSA fears. “The number one question that they would ask me is, ‘Is it safe for me to apply, and what are my options?’” she said.

While the FAFSA is a federal application, California has its own state application that the student aid commission stresses is not shared with federal agencies. It’s called the , known as CADAA. Legal experts told CalMatters that federal agencies would have to  to access those state records.

The CADAA gives students access to state tuition waivers and several thousand dollars in other grants, but FAFSA is the only way for students to also receive federal student loans and the Pell grant, which can .

Originally meant for undocumented students, the state application last year was expanded to permit students with a parent who wasn’t a citizen to apply for state aid. The student aid commission took that step because of massive technological issues with the. But a senior staffer at the student aid commission told California lawmakers last year that the state application may need to take a larger role in handling student financial aid if the federal immigration climate changes — .

Two new state bills may help, Gonzales and other commission officials said. One would . Another would . Both bills are in their early stages, though the extension legislation could move quickly: Lawmakers last March  to address that year’s tech-related federal application mishaps.

“We have examples of families who actually have chosen not to submit the FAFSA application, and have opted instead for the CADAA,” said Marcos Montes, policy director for Southern California College Attainment Network, a coalition of nonprofits that helps students apply for college and financial aid. He said that’s what counselors in the network told him who specifically work with families living in public housing.

Montes said most mixed-status families he’s encountered who are foregoing FAFSA are those applying for financial aid for the first time. They’re less familiar with the process and are more hesitant to share information with the federal government, especially if they’ve submitted few, if any, personal records to federal authorities.

“They do realize that they’re leaving financial aid money on the table,” he said.

Federal role unclear, loss of money could be steep

There are many unknowns about Trump’s plans for student financial aid data, but Montes listed several new developments that he and his college access colleagues find concerning. One is billionaire Elon Musk’s group, called Department of Government Efficiency, that reportedly gained access to student loan records. Last week the undergraduate student association of the University of California  to halt Musk’s group’s access to student financial aid files. In response, the U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday said it would temporarily block Musk’s group from accessing those files, . That deal will last until at least Feb. 17.

Another worry is that the federal Department of Homeland Security, which includes immigration enforcement agencies, has asked officials at the Internal Revenue Service for help removing individuals who are in the country illegally,  It’s another indication of how immigration enforcement is pairing with outside agencies, Montes said.

For students who’ve already applied for federal financial aid in past years or whose parents have submitted tax returns, the federal government already has their information. That’s what the University of California is explaining to students.

“If your family has submitted this information in the past, it may continue to be accessible to those same government agencies,” the university . “Submission of a FAFSA, in this case, may not increase the amount of information about your family that is already accessible to the federal government. However, if your family has not had any data exchanged in these or other spaces, then submission of a FAFSA may present new information on the status of your family.”

A UC advisory group in December calculated that if every student with undocumented family members opted out of federal aid by only completing the state application, $85 million in grants .

“The University of California does not have the resources to backfill for $85 million in missing federal Pell Grants, much less any lost access to federal student loans or work-study,” wrote Stett Holbrook, a UC spokesperson, in a statement to CalMatters. 

The $10.5 million the state provided to help people pay for job training and industry certifications ran out approximately six months ahead of schedule.

Legislators added an additional $7.5 million worth of grants to the last week during a budget hearing. The initial $10.5 million for the program was supposed to last through June but ran out in December, .

Named for former Gov. Mike Foster, the grants provide financial support for students looking to earn credentials in high-demand, skilled industries such as construction, health care and information technology.

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The money can be put toward programs at Louisiana’s community and technical colleges and the state Board of Regents has approved. Students can generally receive $3,200 per academic year or $1,600 per semester if they are enrolled full time. The award maxes out at $6,400 in total over three years.

People who qualify must come from households earning less than 300% of the federal poverty level, which is $43,740 for a single person or $90,000 for a family of four. They also cannot have previously earned an undergraduate degree, and the students must also be at least 20 years old to qualify for the current academic year.

The types of job training the grant covers include nursing degrees, masonry, roofing, plumbing, cloud computing and .

The extra $7.5 million being used to fund the programs is unspent money from 2023, the first year the grants were awarded. Not as many people took advantage of the program that year because it was new and not well known at the time, officials said.

Monty Sullivan, head of Louisiana’s Community and Technical College System, said he believed the surge in interest in the program is related to economic factors, such as the rising cost of groceries. People are seeking ways to make more money, he said.

“The program is working. That’s the bottom line,” he said.

The Louisiana Board of Regents has asked that state lawmakers double the funding available for M.J. Foster grants to $21 million for the next academic year.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.

The challenges with last year’s launch have been well-documented. In fact, I took a six-month leave from my post as president of the College Board to join the U.S. Department of Education in fixing the FAFSA. After months of hard work, we are confident this year will be much better. We arrived at this point by adhering to a few best practices for technology development, whether for the government or the private sector.

The development and launch of a new FAFSA for the 2024-25 admissions cycle faced unique challenges. In today’s world, policy complexity produces software complexity. In turn, software complexity produces increased expenses, delays, and errors. 

In December 2020, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act – well-intended, bipartisan legislation that aimed to shorten the form, increase accuracy by importing tax data from the Internal Revenue Service, and, ultimately, expand eligibility for Pell Grants.

This Act required brand-new software composed of multiple components that are themselves integrated to a dozen other systems, many housed in other agencies. While the Department of Education is full of devoted public servants with tremendous knowledge about financial aid and a passion for helping people go to college, they had limited experience building modern, complex software applications. In addition, due to the nature of government contracting, the Department ended up working with four separate vendors to build the new FAFSA. 

Given all of these challenges, the problems encountered during the 2024-25 launch should not have been a surprise. But that is little comfort to students and families who had a difficult experience last year.

So why is this year better? In preparing for the 2025-26 launch, our work was guided by five key principles, all of which can be applied to any government endeavor:

1. Focus on what is most important. A common mistake in software is trying to do too much. Failing to make tough choices leads to missed deadlines, poor code quality and user frustration. We focused on two things: 1) fixing any bugs that prevented students from submitting the form; and 2) delivering a stable application on a defined timeline for students, families, and institutions of higher education. This required us to make tough choices, such as deferring some new features, which allowed us to launch well ahead of last year’s schedule.
2. Use data to identify critical user issues. Data is a powerful tool to zero in on challenges that affect large numbers of users. For example, a question in the 2024-25 FAFSA about a “direct unsubsidized loan” was originally worded in a way that unintentionally caused too many students – over 5% – to forgo Pell Grants and subsidized federal loans. After seeing the data and working with users, that question was redesigned, and the number of students misinterpreting it declined precipitously.
3. Invest heavily in testing. Comprehensive testing is the most important aspect of any complex software project. We developed multiple new testing tools and methodologies, marrying data science and automated testing, that enabled us to verify the accuracy of the data we send to colleges, universities, and state agencies. We collaborated with the IRS to double-check the tax data that we receive. Most importantly, we conducted seven weeks of beta testing with more than 70 organizations – college access nonprofits, high schools and school districts, colleges and universities – before expanding testing to all interested students earlier this week. Over 67,000 students submitted real FAFSA forms during this testing period, and we traveled to many universities to sit with financial aid professionals as they independently verified the data we sent them.
4. Embrace transparency. Because of the uncertainties and delays surrounding the 2024-25 FAFSA, key external stakeholders felt unprepared to support students. A chorus of advisors from the wider community told us that we needed to be more open about the work underway this year, both strides and setbacks, in order to build back this trust. We invested time and effort in building more channels and frequency for communication, including a new website at where we regularly updated statistics, provided updates on bug fixes, and shared stories from the field.
5. Harness the power of the broader community. The success of the FAFSA depends not just on the government but also on a large ecosystem of organizations that play a vital role in supporting students and families. In part because of the breakdown of trust, the community was often out of sync and at times at-odds. By intentionally engaging these stakeholders, we were able to strengthen the partnerships needed to deliver a successful launch for families, including a critical testing period.

Ahead of the launch in November, we knew that the large majority of students can complete the FAFSA quickly: Over 90 percent of this year’s applicants reported that they completed it in a “reasonable amount of time.” Ultimately, for many people, the promise of FAFSA simplification – a simpler form that provides more aid – has been or will be realized.

There is more work to be done in the years ahead. There will be families who may struggle with the FAFSA; there are usability issues we have not had time to fix yet. For example, the ability for a student to invite their parent to the form needs to be simplified. The team is aware of these problems and will now turn its attention to making further improvements that will benefit everyone, especially those from underrepresented communities.

Building good software is hard; building good software under the unique constraints of the federal government is harder. But delivering a simpler FAFSA that serves students, families and institutions is a strong first step – and continuing to apply these lessons will build on that success.

The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) officially released the 2025–26 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) on Nov. 21, 10 days before its Dec. 1 goal and three days after opening the form to all students and families as part of .

The online FAFSA form is available to all students and families at , and the paper form is also now available for students to submit.

“I’m pleased to announce that after four successful rounds of beta testing, the 2025–26 FAFSA form is now available to all students and families,”  U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “After months of hard work and lots of feedback from students, schools, and other stakeholders, we can say with confidence that FAFSA is working and will serve as the gateway to college access and affordability to millions of students.”

The beta testing for the 2025-26 FAFSA followed the rocky launch of the “Better FAFSA” , which saw multiple glitches and delays and caused stress for students and families seeking help paying for college.

While many students experienced delays, students from mixed-status families, or those whose parents don’t have a social security number, were . DOE officials previously told members of the press that “many” mixed-status students successfully submitted their applications during Beta 1, which started Oct. 1.

Beta 2 testing started on Oct. 15, and Beta 3 started in early November. The final stage of testing, Beta 4, started on Nov. 13, expanding the testing to thousands of additional students recruited by various community and education organizations. On Nov. 18, the DOE entered its final stage of beta testing, “Expanded Beta 4,” which allowed all students to submit forms.

According to , more than 167,000 students successfully submitted their 2025-26 FAFSA during the beta testing period. The Department has sent records to more than 5,200 schools across the U.S., the release said.

“Already, over 650,000 more applicants are eligible for Pell Grants, and more students are receiving Pell Grants, this school year compared to last year,” Cardona said. “We stand ready to help millions more students complete the FAFSA and get the financial aid they need to pursue their dreams of a college education.”

The College Foundation of North Carolina (CFNC) is encouraging students and families to fill out the FAFSA as soon as possible.

“Last year the FAFSA was revamped into a new form that delayed the process, and some families experienced issues submitting it,” CFNC said in a press release. “But so far this year the application process has been running smoothly, with no critical errors reported so far, so there is no need to wait to get started.”

The 2025–26 FAFSA form is available now for the award year that runs from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026. Here’s what you need to know about the FAFSA and how to apply.

How to apply

First, you’ll need to .

Your contributors will also need to create their own accounts. Your contributors are anyone required to provide information on your FAFSA form, such as your parents or your spouse.

If you are a student, you will be required to enter your Social Security number (SSN) to create a StudentAid.gov account unless you’re a citizen of the  (the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau).

If your contributors do not have a SSN, they can still create an account to complete their section of your FAFSA form. However, if your contributors do have a SSN, you are required to provide the number when inviting them to contribute to your FAFSA form.

Next, gather the documents needed to apply. The FAFSA asks for information about you (your name, date of birth, address, etc.) and your financial situation. Here are some examples of the information you might need:

• Your parents’ SSNs if they have SSNs and you’re a 
• Tax returns
• Records of child support received
• Current balances of cash, savings, and checking accounts
• Net worth of investments, businesses, and farms

The financial data determines a family’s expected out-of-pocket college payments. If those returns don’t reflect your current financial situation, you can file an appeal for a  with the school you plan to attend.

File your FAFSA form online at , by completing a  and mailing it, or by requesting a print-out of the FAFSA PDF at 1-800-433-3243 and mailing it. Check out this resource for information on .

If you need help filling out the FAFSA, you can speak with someone at the DOE’s contact center at 1-800-433-3243 or by live chat . The Department is also offering expanded FAFSA-only hours at the center Nov. 22 through March 2.

Students and families can reach agents at the contact center in English or in Spanish. Interpretation services in additional languages can be accessed .

Why the FAFSA matters

According to the CFNC, completing the FAFSA is “an important step toward paying for college.”

Completing a FAFSA makes you eligible for federal aid, , and previous Covid-19 relief. Many North Carolina colleges and universities also use the form to divvy up state aid.

Affordability is one of the main barriers to postsecondary attainment. The FAFSA helps many students access money for college they otherwise couldn’t. In North Carolina, , as of Sept. 27, 2024.

However, barriers to filling out the form exist for many students. , and first-generation prospective college students and their families also face barriers.

A lack of reliable internet access and language barriers can also be a challenge. Community colleges across the state have hosted FAFSA events to help provide in-person assistance filling out the forms.

“We are very fortunate to have our community colleges be an advocate for that,” Amy Denton, a regional representative at CFNC,

This year, CFNC is encouraging students and families to apply for the 2025-26 FAFSA early.

One reason is to maximize your financial aid opportunities. According to a CFNC release, some funding is allocated first-come, first-served, and some scholarships have early deadlines.

“So get all the aid you qualify for by submitting your FAFSA early,” the release says.

Applying early also means you will receive your financial aid package award letters sooner.

“Knowing how much federal, state and college-based aid you’re awarded can help you decide which options fit your budget,” CFNC said.

In North Carolina, applying for the FAFSA also automatically enrolls you for the . That scholarship covers tuition and fees at any North Carolina community college for students from families making $80,000 a year or less. If interested in a university, students can get a minimum of $5,000 towards tuition and fees at any of the 16 UNC system schools.

What to do if you don’t or can’t complete it

Most individual colleges have their own scholarship and aid dashboards.

While many need-based funds require a FAFSA, some allow other documentation of your financial situation. Many scholarships don’t require any financial documentation.

If you’re not a U.S. citizen, you might not . In this case, you can use your Alien Registration number to apply. Non-citizen students can also seek aid at individual colleges with funds that don’t require the FAFSA, like these resources at  and .

You can learn more about other FAFSA barriers .

More resources

The Department recently released several new resources to assist students and families in completing and submitting the FAFSA form during the 2025–26 cycle:

• : A new resource that explains what families and partners need to know about creating a StudentAid.gov account.
• : Updated tips for preparing to fill out and submitting the FAFSA form. This resource is also linked to the StudentAid.gov Dashboard to promote easier access for students and their required contributor(s).
• : Provides an estimate of the 2025–26 Student Aid Index (SAI) and Federal Pell Grant eligibility calculation.
• : A new, stand-alone tool to help students and families determine who will need to provide contributor information on the 2025–26 FAFSA form prior to starting the application.
• : Updated videos to help students and families understand the importance of the FAFSA form, who is a FAFSA contributor, and what happens after submitting the form.

Here are other resources:

• : Updated resources for school counselors, college access professionals, and mentors with information about the FAFSA process.
• : A list of known issues with the form updated in real-time as bugs are fixed in beta testing.
• FAFSA videos: Updated videos to help students and families understand the importance of the FAFSA, who is a FAFSA contributor, and what happens after submitting the form:

If you are a student reapplying for the FAFSA, your college’s counseling office is also a great resource.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Updated on Nov. 21 —The Department of Education announced that beta testing of the 2025-26 FAFSA form , 10 days before its Dec. 1, 2024 goal. The official form is now available to all students and families. Those interested in completing the online form can do so at . A paper form is also now available. 

The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) announced on Thursday, Nov. 14 the launch of the final stage of testing (Beta 4) for the 2025–26 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) — which is

As part of the final beta testing, the DOE will open the FAFSA to all students and families under what they are calling “Expanded Beta 4” before the end of November.

“During that time, the Department will continue to carefully monitor the FAFSA form, overall system performance, and support operations, such as our contact center, and adjust operations as needed,” a DOE release says. “This will allow the Department to test the FAFSA system with higher volumes of users, while giving students an opportunity to submit online 2025–26 FAFSA forms before Dec. 1.”

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Once the DOE determines the “FAFSA system is operating smoothly with high volumes of users” during Expanded Beta 4, the 2025-26 FAFSA form will officially be released.

“Allowing more students to access the FAFSA form is the final state of beta testing as we prepare to officially launch the form no later than Dec. 1,” DOE Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal said.

Since testing started on Oct. 1, more than 14,000 students have successfully submitted their 2025-26 FAFSA forms, according to the DOE release. The forms of those students have been processed, and the DOE has sent more than 81,000 records to more than 1,850 schools across 43 states.

“The Department has not found any critical bugs during the beta testing period, and the FAFSA system is working end-to-end,” the release says. “In addition, the Department has focused on addressing issues and improving the user experience in the application. Students and families are benefiting from these enhancements, leading to a satisfaction rating for beta participants of 95%.”

The beta testing for the 2025-26 FAFSA follows the rocky launch of the “Better FAFSA” , which saw multiple glitches and delays and caused stress for students and families seeking help paying for college.

While many students experienced delays, students from mixed-status families, or those whose parents don’t have a social security number, were . DOE officials previously told members of the press that “many” mixed-status students successfully submitted their applications during Beta 1, which started Oct. 1.

Beta 2 testing started on Oct. 15, and Beta 3 started in early November. The final stage of testing, Beta 4, started on Wednesday, Nov. 13, expanding the testing to thousands of additional students recruited by various community and education organizations.

“We are in a radically different and better place than last cycle,” FAFSA Executive Advisor Jeremy Singer told reporters during a call on Thursday. “Our systems have been fully tested, and they are ready to go.”

Singer said the Department has successfully tested this year’s application with several different subgroups, including active duty military members, veterans, students with dependent children, students experiencing homelessness, and students from mixed-status families.

On Nov. 15, the DOE is visiting a Texas prison with a community organization to assist incarcerated students with filling out the paper form, Singer said.

“We’ve been determined to make sure that last year’s delays and errors were not repeated again this year,” Kvaal told reporters.

Bennett College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington are participating in Beta 3 and 4 testing stages.

In addition to the expanded beta testing, the Department has also “significantly staffed up” its call center, Singer said, adding more than 700 agents since last January. Once the FAFSA officially launches, the Department also plans to offer extended hours at night and on Saturdays.

“This new phase of expanded Beta 4 gives us an opportunity to comprehensively test the FAFSA application at an even larger scale than we have to date,” Singer said. “We understand that after last year, we are still in the process of rebuilding trust with families, with institutions, and it led us to take these extra precautions.”

You can read more about Beta results and testing 

FAFSA resources

The Department recently released several new resources to assist students and families in completing and submitting the FAFSA form during the 2025–26 cycle:

• : A new resource that explains what families and partners need to know about creating a StudentAid.gov account.
• : Updated tips for preparing to fill out and submitting the FAFSA form. This resource will also be linked from the StudentAid.gov Dashboard to promote easier access for students and their required contributor(s).
• : Provides an estimate of the 2025–26 Student Aid Index (SAI) and Federal Pell Grant eligibility calculation.
• : A new, stand-alone tool to help students and families determine who will need to provide contributor information on the 2025–26 FAFSA form prior to starting the application.
• : Updated videos to help students and families understand the importance of the FAFSA form, who is a FAFSA contributor, and what happens after submitting the form.

Here are other resources:

• : Updated resources for school counselors, college access professionals, and mentors with information about the FAFSA process.
• : A list of known issues with the form updated in real-time as bugs are fixed in beta testing.
• FAFSA videos: Updated videos to help students and families understand the importance of the FAFSA, who is a FAFSA contributor, and what happens after submitting the form:

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

WASHINGTON — A measure to ensure the federal student aid form opens up annually by Oct. 1 passed the U.S. House Friday with overwhelming bipartisan support.

The  — which passed 381-1 — came after the U.S. Department of Education faced major backlash over the botched rollout of the 2024-25 , or FAFSA. California Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren was the only lawmaker to vote against the bill. 

Though the form got a makeover after Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act in late 2020, users faced multiple glitches and technical errors throughout the form’s soft launch in December and past its full debut in January, prompting processing delays and gaps in submissions.

The department has worked to correct these glitches and close that gap while also fixing major issues that prevented parents without Social Security numbers from completing the form.

Adding another complication, the  it would use a phased rollout of the 2025-26 form in an attempt to address any errors that might arise before it opens up to everyone — making the application fully available two months later than usual.

“Since Oct. 1, the Department has conducted three successful beta tests of the 2025–26 FAFSA form to ensure it is ready for all students and families on or before Dec. 1,” U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal said in a statement shared Monday with States Newsroom, while noting that the department already began its fourth testing stage this past week.

“We have a fully functioning site and a form working end-to-end that has been successfully submitted by more than 10,000 students, with dozens of schools all over the country receiving the data for student aid packages,” he said.

The department is on track to launch the 2026-27 FAFSA on Oct. 1, 2025, with “a fully functioning system,” according to Kvaal. 

Codified deadline

Though the department legally has until Jan. 1 to roll out the form, it typically launches Oct. 1.

U.S. Rep. Erin Houchin, an Indiana Republican and member of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, in July  to standardize that deadline.

“I’m especially frustrated considering the Department of Education has had three years to simplify the FAFSA as Congress has dictated,” Houchin said during floor debate Friday.

She also  from the Government Accountability Office, including that nearly three-quarters of all calls to the call center went unanswered in the first five months of the 2024-25 rollout.

“We want this program to work — we want to make sure that children and families that want to send their kids to college have the availability to do that and that the FAFSA is available and workable,” she added.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, ranking member of the House education panel, echoed his support during the floor debate, saying the measure will “help ensure that even more students have the information they need in a timelier manner to access Pell Grants and other vital student aid.”

Scott initially opposed the effort when the committee took it up in July out of concerns that the implementation deadline could force the department to roll out an incomplete form on Oct. 1 of this year.

“However, because we’re now considering the bill after Oct. 1, the deadline will apply next year, 2025, and that gives the department ample time to make improvements and fix any lingering issues,” the Virginia Democrat said.

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican,  in July.

The bill was referred to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, where Cassidy serves as ranking member. After Republicans won a Senate majority in the Nov. 5 elections,  to chair the panel next year. 

This originally appeared on .

The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) announced on Tuesday, Oct. 15, the launch of the second stage of testing (Beta 2) for the 2025–26 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) — which is

The announcement follows two weeks of the first round of testing (Beta 1), during which “the Department did not uncover any critical bugs,” according to a press release.

During Beta 1, which started Oct. 1, more than 650 students successfully submitted applications, the DOE said, and dozens of student corrections were successfully completed. Nearly 600 higher education institutions also received 6,266 Institutional Student Information Records (ISIRs) generated by those applications.

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FAFSA Executive Advisor Jeremy Singer said the department’s original goal was to submit and process forms for 100 students during Beta 1.

“Instead, we had more than six times that number of students and we were able to see the forms move from submission to processing — and even corrections — without any major issues,” Singer said. “We learned a tremendous amount from being able to observe students, families, and community-based organizations interacting with the FAFSA form in real time, and we are on track for a full launch on or before Dec. 1.”

Beta 2 launched on Tuesday, DOE officials said during a press briefing call. This second round of testing includes 16 organizations that will work together to recruit thousands of students from diverse income, geographic, family, and educational backgrounds, the department said.

Beta 2 will also include returning students for the first time during the testing period. Ahead of the Dec. 1 launch for all students, DOE officials said there will also be a third and fourth round of testing. Beta 3 is expected to launch

The beta testing for the 2025-26 FAFSA follows the rocky launch of the “Better FAFSA” , which saw multiple glitches and delays and caused stress for students and families seeking help paying for college.

While many students experienced delays, students from mixed-status families, or those whose parents don’t have a social security number, were .

On Tuesday, DOE officials told members of the press that “many” mixed-status students successfully submitted their applications during Beta 1.

“Throughout the extensive Beta 1 testing, the Department encountered opportunities to improve the usability of the FAFSA form, which was expected given that the Department has prioritized the stability of the application,” the DOE press release said. “Improving usability will continue to be a focus of the Department following the full launch of the FAFSA form on or before Dec. 1.”

For Beta 1 testing, DOE staff attended 2025-26 FAFSA events from Oct. 1-3 in six cities across the country — Birmingham, Alabama; Santa Barbara, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Dallas, Texas; and Alexandria, Virginia.

The department expects more attendees from those events to continue submitting the FAFSA form, along with students being targeted during Beta 2.

Bennett College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington are participating in the upcoming testing stages.

“On behalf of the Department of Education, I want to offer a huge thank you to all of the students, family members, counselors, financial aid experts, and others participating in the testing process,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal. “Their efforts are helping us get the FAFSA ready for everyone.”

You can read more about Beta 1 results, along with upcoming testing,

FAFSA resources

• : Updated resources for school counselors, college access professionals, and mentors with information about the FAFSA process.
• : A list of known issues with the form updated in real-time as bugs are fixed in beta testing.
• FAFSA videos: Updated videos to help students and families understand the importance of the FAFSA, who is a FAFSA contributor, and what happens after submitting the form:

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Education is launching the first testing period for its phased rollout of the 2025-26 form to apply for federal financial student aid on Tuesday, with more students set to partake in this beginning testing stage than initially expected.

The department  it would be using a staggered approach to launch the 2025-26  — or FAFSA — in order to address any issues that might arise before the form opens up to everyone by Dec. 1. The number of students able to complete the form will gradually increase throughout four separate testing stages, with the first one beginning Oct. 1.

The phased rollout makes the form fully available two months later than usual and comes as the 2024-25 form — which got a makeover after Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act in late 2020 — faced a series of highly publicized hiccups that the department has worked to fix.

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Earlier in September, the department  chosen to participate in the first testing period: Alabama Possible; Bridge 2 Life, in Florida; College AIM, in Georgia; Education is Freedom, in Texas; the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara, in California; and the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria, in Virginia.

“Thanks to the wonderful organizations, we expect closer to 1,000 students in Beta 1 as opposed to the 100 we initially thought,” FAFSA executive adviser Jeremy Singer said on a call with reporters Monday regarding the 2025-26 form.

During this first testing stage, U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal said the department will process students’ FAFSAs, “give students an opportunity to make corrections, if needed, and send the records to colleges and state agencies.”

“Colleges will be able to use these same records when it’s time for them to make financial aid offers,” said Kvaal, who oversees higher education and financial aid, including the Office of Federal Student Aid.

Three more testing periods

The department on Monday also named 78 community-based organizations, governmental entities, high schools, school districts and institutions of higher education to participate in its three subsequent testing periods for the 2025-26 form.

Three of the community-based organizations chosen to take part in the first testing period — Florida’s Bridge 2 Life; Texas’ Education is Freedom; and Virginia’s Scholarship Fund of Alexandria — will also participate in subsequent testing stages.

To help students and families prepare for the 2025-26 application cycle, the department said this week it’s releasing a revised , updated resources for creating a , including a “parent wizard,” as well as an updated prototype of the 2025-26 FAFSA.

Last week, the department released  outlining 10 steps it’s taking to . Part of those efforts include the department strengthening its leadership team and working to address issues for families without Social Security numbers when completing the form, in addition to vendors adding more than 700 new call center agents.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

While issues have plagued the federal government’s revamp of the application for student aid, West Virginia’s higher education leaders say help from Gov. Jim Justice and the state Legislature have caused the state to be much better off than others.

The 2024-2025 Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms debuted in January, than it’s typically available.

In April, over , allowing West Virginia students to bypass filling out the form and still be eligible for state school aid including the Promise Scholarship and the Higher Education Grant Program.

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In addition to the state of emergency, redirecting about $83.2 million from the state’s rainy day fund to the state Higher Education Policy Commission to be distributed to college-bound students for the fall college 2024 semester.

“By having the flexibility to make these adjustments, we have been able to alleviate student concerns about being able to afford to go to college this fall,” said Jessica Tice, senior director of communication for the state HECP. “We look forward to seeing final enrollment and award numbers in the coming months.”

The commission awarded funding through the Higher Education Grant Program to 43 ,510 students for the 2024-25 school year, up from 31,867 students awarded in the 2023-2024 year, Tice said. She added that the commission does not anticipate that every student who was awarded funding will use it.

In addition, 30 students who qualified for the Promise Scholarship but did not have a current FAFSA on file were awarded the scholarship as a direct result of the change, she said.

As of Monday, 63,291 West Virginia students had completed the FAFSA, Tice said.

Tice said the additional funding from the Legislature allowed the HEPC to increase the amount of the grant award from $3,300 last year to $6,800 this year.

“This is an unprecedented one-time amount for students who have financial need,” Tice said.

Also, the HEPC provided funding to institutions to allow them to provide $2,000 College Access Grants to students with more need, she said.

Tice said the concerns about the 2024-2025 FAFSA form are largely at the colleges and university level now. The federal Department of Education recently announced that colleges and universities won’t be able to submit batch corrections to files for aid this cycle, which will put a burden on the institutions, she said.

West Virginia University is receiving and processing the 2024-25 FAFSA and disbursements are on schedule, said April Kaull, executive director of communications. The first day of classes at WVU is Aug. 21.

“We want students and their families to know that they should apply for federal or state aid for fall 2024,” Kaull said. “If they’ve put it off or become frustrated and thrown in the towel, we can help. It is not too late to get financial aid in place for a successful start to the fall semester.”

Tice said higher education officials are concerned about the rollout of the 2025-2026 FAFSA form, which is expected to be

“As we continue working at the state level to do everything we can to award students state aid despite their FAFSA status, we are very concerned about the impact of another delay,” Tice said. “The FAFSA allows students to maximize their financial aid beyond state programs, and we want all of our students — especially those with financial need — to be able to access all of the funding they are eligible to receive.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

Now, with the start of the next financial aid season less than three months away, the U.S. Department of Education won’t promise it can avoid a repeat.

The department is “working toward” opening the Free Application for Federal Student Aid on time and ensuring “a smooth experience,” a spokesperson told ����Ӱ��, but dismissed last week’s bipartisan vote by the House education committee to legally enforce an Oct. 1 start as an unhelpful “political stunt.”

comes as financial aid officials are dealing with another delay hindering some students from receiving final aid packages for the fall. The complications have also deterred others from even applying for assistance. Completion rates remain below last year’s rate, suggesting enrollment will stay down this fall.

“Are we going to close the gap? It would be a really herculean effort,” said Bill DeBaun, senior director for data and strategic initiatives at the National College Attainment Network, an organization of college access organizations. Summer, he said, isn’t typically FAFSA season. But even increasing the rate by 3 or 4 percentage points would mean “tens of thousands of additional” students receiving funds for college. 

Members of Congress say forcing the department to release next year’s FAFSA on Oct. 1 will avoid the confusion and chaos that families and colleges endured this year. “Establishing a hard deadline … will provide students, families and schools with much needed clarity and stability,” Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, who chairs the House education committee, said before the July 10 vote.

Six Democrats on the committee who voted against the bill argued that Congress didn’t provide to help the department make the switch and predicted it could lead to even more errors. 

“I want FAFSA to work; we all want FAFSA to work,” said Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, the ranking Democrat on the committee. “What we don’t want is for the department to rush to meet arbitrary deadlines and push out a FAFSA form once again that has the same technical problems.”

‘A lot of anxiety’

Schools that predominantly serve students whose parents are not U.S. citizens — the population most harmed by the FAFSA overhaul — have been especially stressed.

“It’s been a rollercoaster,” said Ingrid Fragoso, a counselor at KIPP Austin Collegiate in Texas. Only about 10% of the charter school’s students have parents with social security numbers. The redesign first blocked them from completing the form and then required  to submit it. “In the beginning, there was a lot of anxiety around how to help our students.”

At the peak of the chaos, in February and March, the counseling team phoned the department daily to troubleshoot issues for families. While waiting on hold, the counselors used a detailed grid of each senior’s schedule to quickly grab students from class when a department staffer came on the line. For parents with limited English skills, they held practice sessions prior to calls. Now, all 91 students going to four-year schools have received aid packages.

Some counselors and higher education officials say they’re beginning to see the streamlined FAFSA’s potential.

“I feel a lot better about where we’re at than I did a few weeks ago,” said Karen Krause, the executive director of financial aid at the University of Texas at Arlington. The FAFSA completion rate is up 4% compared to last year, bucking and national trends, and the staff was able to begin distributing aid offers in April — ahead of many other . “I do think it’s going to be a better process for students and families.”

When FAFSA works, it works quickly — sometimes in less than 10 minutes. Students and parents who have submitted the forms, she said, keep asking, “Is that all?” The education department also kept to conduct fewer reviews of students’ forms. At UT Arlington, that number dropped dramatically, from over 5,300 last year to under 200, Krause said. 

At the same time, her staff is grappling with a new setback — a backlog of corrections the department . Those revisions ultimately affect how much money colleges can offer students, especially those whose financial circumstances changed since they first applied.

“Say a family member loses a job or there are medical expenses,” explained Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. In those cases, schools might issue a new offer to make tuition more affordable, but those figures won’t be official until the education department approves them. 

Currently, colleges can only one at a time.

“It’s manual and it’s way more work,” Desjean said. 

But they can’t submit them in bulk until next month, a time when students are usually preparing to register for classes and move into dorms. 

‘Answers for kids’ 

If higher education officials feel any sense of relief after such a stormy season, it’s partly because of their own work to ensure families don’t pay the price for FAFSA’s botched implementation. UT Arlington, for one, has waived late fees for students still waiting on federal aid and isn’t dropping them from summer classes if they can’t make tuition payments, Krause said.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice declared a state of emergency over FAFSA, allowing students to apply for state aid without completing the federal form. The move made 17,000 students eligible for merit- or need-based aid, according to a state higher education commission.

And at the University of Florida, Mary Parker, vice president for enrollment management, created a special that offers low-income students up to $15,000 to tide them over until their federal aid comes through. If they end up qualifying for less federal aid than the scholarship covers, they won’t have to make up the difference.

That short-term fix impressed one university official who understands the strain on families with first-time college students.

“It will not be perfect, but [Parker] had enough in her budget to eat the cost of the margin of error. It was more important to prioritize first-generation students,” said Penny Schwinn, the former Tennessee education commissioner who now serves as vice president for the university’s “pre-K to pre-bachelors” initiatives. “K-12 and states are wrestling with this, and it was a really proud moment to see my colleague find innovative and immediate answers for kids.”

But colleges are taking risks when they use their own funds to lower tuition costs for students, said Desjean, with the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

“Not all schools can afford to front their own money while waiting for the federal dollars,” she said. “But it’s great to see that those who are able are doing what they can to minimize harm to students.”

Even when California high school seniors set a record last year in applying for college financial aid, , leaving gobs of money on the table.

Now, the state agency overseeing student grants and scholarships is about to embark on a new campaign to persuade more students and their parents to apply for financial aid. The strategy is buttressed by novel market research that produced counterintuitive conclusions about what compels people to seek cash for college.

It can’t come at a better time as financial aid applications in California and nationally compared to last year, largely due to major setbacks with the .

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Core to the is that low-income parents and students know that a college degree often leads to higher wages, but they have significant anxiety about .

“Nationally, we are grappling with this question about, ‘How do we communicate to students about the value of an education after high school and the return on investment?” said Jake Brymner, deputy director of policy and public affairs at the California Student Aid Commission.

Avoiding language that sounds too good to be true, such as “100%” of tuition covered, even if that’s technically accurate, was one lesson learned from a round of focus groups led by a public opinion research firm that the student aid commission hired with philanthropic funds. Imagery such as coins or bags of money implied scams, not the promise of affordability, the panel of parents and students told the market researchers.

And video testimonials from students who were frank about their ambivalence toward pursuing college, but mustered the will anyway to apply for financial aid, resonated deeply with participants of the focus groups, which took place between December and April.

“It was surprising to see that ‘free money,’ a phrase like that, leads to distrust at times,” said Michael Lemus, a marketing manager at the student aid commission who helps with developing videos the agency produces to explain the intricacies of applying for financial aid.

Added Sara Beth Brooks, who’s also on the team: “The basic values behind our social media channels is that we believe we can cut through government jargon and take information directly to constituents.”

Language on financial aid is persuasive

A survey conducted between May and June of nearly 1,200 high school students and parents showed an 11 percentage point jump among those who said they were likely to apply for financial aid, . The participants were asked if they would apply and then asked a second time after viewing the refined marketing material, which included a mix of video testimonials and written material across 20 minutes.

The idea to examine the best ways to reach students was . The findings from the focus groups and the survey were presented to commission members Thursday. CalMatters was given an advance copy of the results.

“Everyone talks about ‘you got to strengthen your communications, meet students where they’re at,’” said Marlene Garcia, of the student aid commission, at the meeting. “It isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s hard, and this team is figuring it out.

The likelihood of completing the state or federal financial aid applications  among the groups the California Student Aid Commission considered a priority — students with grades below a B or C average, those who were in low- and middle-income households and students who hadn’t taken the core high school courses required for admission to the state’s public universities.

State tuition waivers and federal cash grants that don’t have to be repaid can fetch students as much as $21,000 or more, per year. Without completing financial aid applications, that vital postsecondary assistance is unattainable.

“If we communicate effectively and meet people’s emotional needs, we can increase the likelihood that people will pursue” applying for financial aid, said Robert Pérez, one of the researchers behind the marketing analysis, at the meeting. He’s the founder of public opinion firm Wonder: Strategies for Good.

Specificity mattered to audiences, as well. It’s not enough to say “financial aid.” Parents and students were more drawn to messaging that stressed state and federal grants aren’t loans and don’t have to be repaid.

“I feel more calm knowing these are not loans, but aid,” wrote one mother during the focus groups.

Putting the findings on student grants to work

This summer, the outreach and marketing team will use philanthropic dollars to hire content creators on social media with large followings to publish videos about their own experiences seeking financial aid and completing community college. The team will time that with the Sept. 3 deadline for first-time community college students to apply for the Cal Grant, the main financial aid benefit in California.

The video team at the student aid commission will also feature more personal anecdotes about their paths into college. In another effort to appeal to students who haven’t applied for aid, the commission also will send recent high school graduates postcards with language and imagery informed by the focus groups.

The aid commission was already connecting on social media with students, parents, high school counselors and other professionals involved in the financial aid application process. One video in January than 6 million views on Instagram. It featured Brooks describing a step-by-step process to answer a confusing question on the new federal financial aid application.

The number of followers across the commission’s social media channels has grown prodigiously this past academic year. Last year it had 5,200 followers on Instagram and 800 on TikTok. This May, those grew to 58,000 followers on Instagram and 35,000 on TikTok.

“We could make graphics that explain these things, and I don’t think that they would do as well,” Brooks said. “It’s the human element of somebody saying, ‘I hear that you’re in this situation, I’m going to do everything I can to help you.’”

The videos aren’t slick by design — they often show a member of the outreach team in the car or in their office speaking candidly about how confusing applying for financial aid can be, especially this year when the newly revised federal application encountered a bevy of problems that blocked many students from submitting their applications.

Videos with low production value, high emotional impact

That humility resonates well with audiences, the focus group participants.

A video shown to them earlier this year featured a mother who spoke only in Spanish and her son, who spoke in English, sitting in front of a wall decorated with a crucifix and family photos. The video purposely avoided the slick digital treatment common in advertisements and instead appeared more like a low-budget documentary.

At one point the student, Kenny Funes, said he never felt poor because his parents provided for him, but he was surprised to learn that he qualified for a lot of financial aid because his family’s income was sufficiently low.

Another video was in Spanish and featured an undocumented student who applied for state aid. This and other videos were unscripted and edited down from about 75 minutes to under 3 minutes.

In a final video, a college student spoke about dropping out of high school and then feeling inspired to resume his education. As he’s speaking, the focus group participants respond in real time to how the video content makes them feel. Initially, the mood among the participants drops as the student describes the dead-end jobs he was working. Seconds later, the student recollects a phone call with his mom after she received distressing news from her doctor. That prompted him to return to college. The audience mood starts to climb, responding well to the narrative arc of temporary setback and eventual triumph.

The researchers said that had the videos just emphasized success, they wouldn’t connect as much with the audiences. “When we feel like we’re not alone, we feel like we can do it,” Pérez said. The sincerity prompts the audience to trust the student, which in turn encourages more people to complete the application, he added.

“I understand that frustration…not wanting to fill it out,” the student in the final video, Jesse Williams, said of completing the financial aid application. “Because it is a process.”

Pérez and some of the commissioners also agreed that reaching parents directly will compel more students to apply for aid.

“I feel like the one thing that keeps a lot of students from trying, especially first generation students, is that their parents don’t know where to even start,” said Keiry Saravia, a student commissioner.

“Parents are incredibly important messengers and really underutilized,” Pérez said.

The was originally published on .

confirms that high school students who complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) are more likely to attend college than those who do not. This, of course, is the whole purpose of the federal financial aid program — to help lower- and middle-income students pursue higher education.

Despite the recent unfortunate — to put it mildly — rollout of the simplified FAFSA, the country would still be better off if all high school students completed the form. But even before the current fiasco, on the number of high schoolers filing the FAFSA was worrying. Access to federal aid is contingent on the FAFSA, and if students do not fill it out, they cannot access a major source of financial support for college.

Several states have moved in the right direction in requiring completion. One of the first, Louisiana, saw a 20% increase in FAFSA completions in one year after requiring high school seniors to complete the form to graduate. But the state is its universal FAFSA mandate over concerns about sharing financial information with the federal government, “invading” families’ privacy and jeopardizing their “liberty.” 

Worries about privacy seem misguided, as families share financial information with the government every year by filing tax returns, and much of the data in the FAFSA comes directly from these. Dropping a statewide mandate will not only hurt those students and families who might not learn about available financial aid; if fewer students go on to postsecondary education, it will make it more difficult for states to meet their higher education attainment goals.  This, in turn, will jeopardize the economic benefits to the state that accrue from having a more educated workforce.  

Hopefully, more states will require high school graduates to fill out the form. But beyond hoping, there is a way to make sure this happens: All colleges and universities could require the FAFSA as part of their application for admissions, whether students are applying for financial aid or not. 

This would create much stronger incentives for more states to mandate that high schools take on the responsibility of mandating FAFSA for their graduates. Even students who don’t require need-based financial aid receive large subsidies from both public and private nonprofit colleges and universities, because the full sticker price does not cover the actual cost of the education received. The difference can be quite large — in many cases greater than the value of a Pell Grant — both at public flagships and more selective private schools. The more selective the university, the larger the subsidies, since selectivity is closely related to the resources that colleges have available to spend on students. These are covered in a variety of ways that are supported by federal and state policies: direct government subsidies to colleges and universities; contributions from donors who receive tax benefits; exemptions from income tax on earnings on endowments; and local property taxes. 

If the FAFSA became a routine part of the college application process for all, it would level the playing field for all students in terms of required submissions and make it more likely that more high school students would receive the financial aid they need. Families that pay full freight might object, but the checks they write don’t cover the full cost of their children’s education any more than the small contributions asked of students who receive large scholarships. Why should the wealthiest families be treated differently than those applying for Pell Grants? Both are receiving public financial benefits, just in different forms. The burden on these families would be minimal since most of the information would come directly from the IRS.

Requiring the FAFSA from all applicants would also offer more information to policymakers on the income distribution of students attending college. Since both the federal and state governments heavily subsidize higher education, understanding how those subsidies are distributed across the population is important for making good public policy. These subsidies are, in part, justified on the basis of supporting economic and social mobility. Without knowing who is receiving them, it is impossible to evaluate their effectiveness.  

Having all families fill out the FAFSA whether they are applying for need-based financial aid or not would make possible better federal and state policies in support of the country’s higher education goals.

Citing issues with the federal government’s rollout of a new application for student aid, Gov. Jim Justice on Tuesday declared a state of emergency and suspended a requirement that college-bound high school seniors fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in order to receive state financial aid, including the Promise Scholarship and the Higher Education Grant Program.

The FAFSA form is required for applying for federal student aid and used to determine a student’s financial need. The form recently went through — its first massive revamp in more than 40 years — in an effort to streamline the process.

The changes are supposed to result in more students being eligible for financial aid, especially low-income students. The new FAFSA went live in January, three months later than the application is typically available, and has been plagued by a number of glitches and problems that have caused further delays.

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Justice said Tuesday the issues with the FAFSA have resulted in a 40% reduction in West Virginia high school FAFSA completion rates and have left students wondering if they’ll be able to go to college.

“So the way around this is for the governor to declare a state of emergency … in education that we can bypass this FAFSA stuff and we can at least get on with getting our kids the state funding,” Justice said during his administration briefing Tuesday.

Under the emergency proclamation, students who apply for and qualify for the Promise Scholarship by Sept. 1, 2024, will receive an award of up to $5,500 for the 2024-25 academic year. Students who completed a 2023-24 FAFSA who qualify for the need-based Higher Education Grant, will receive up to $3,400 for the fall semester.

Students who don’t have a previous FAFSA on file but are eligible for SNAP, TANF, Medicaid, CHIP, Child Care Subsidy Program or WIC can show their eligibility letter to their higher education institution’s financial aid office to receive the Higher Education Grant.

In a news release, Sarah Tucker, the state’s chancellor of higher education, said the cost of college is one of the biggest hurdles students — especially low-income students — face when planning for education after high school.

“That’s why our state has invested so strongly in our own financial aid programs — which, combined, total more than $100 million each year for West Virginia students,” she said. “I thank Governor Justice for his strong leadership and allowing students to access these funds this year despite their FAFSA status. And I encourage students to continue working to complete the FAFSA so that they can get as much money from other sources, including the federal government, as possible.”

The federal Department of Education on Tuesday encouraged students to fill out the FAFSA, saying that issues with the application have been resolved, .

Justice encouraged students and parents to call a state hotline at 1-877-987-7664 or visit for more information and assistance with applying for aid.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

Talk to some high school and college students about this year’s Free Application for Financial Student Aid, or FAFSA, and they share their concerns as well as their optimism. Few voice anger about the glitches that have made this financial aid season so stressful.

Why? Because they understand that is the key to $150 billion of college grants, work-study funds and federal student loans that will pay for college. They understand that FAFSA is not the enemy.

Regardless, the number of FAFSA submissions are down nationwide, including Texas, because of problems with the form that have delayed some students from completing the application and have discouraged others from attempting it.

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High school and college counselors, advisers and administrators know this and have scheduled a second wave of workshops now through early May to encourage students to fill out the form and submit it.

About 200 students who had questions about their application participated in the bilingual FAFSA Workshop on April 20 at the Education Service Center Region 19 to get answers. Almost all came with family members, a laptop computer and financial information with the hope that they could start, or submit their applications that day.

Among them was Yaxley Bouche, an 18-year-old senior from Austin High School. She and her mother, Diana, wanted to complete the parent portion. Once done, the student could submit her FAFSA.

“I’m a little stressed about how much money I will get,” said the Central resident who wants to study nursing at El Paso Community College or the University of Texas at El Paso. “Will it be less than others because I’m submitting (my application) late?”

With the help of a small army of volunteers, mostly from EPCC and UTEP, students found the guidance they needed.

The two institutions organized this special event and agreed to participate in others during the next two weeks to help other families that have been confused by FAFSA.

One volunteer helped Diana Bouche start an account, which will take three days to be verified. After that, her daughter can submit her application, which should be accepted in 10 business days.

“I’m not comfortable yet,” Yaxley Bouche said as she closed her laptop before leaving. “I’m still concerned with the wait.”

Fewer seniors complete FAFSA

According to the as of April 12, only 29% of high school seniors have completed their FAFSA. More than 1.2 million have submitted their application, but that is 36% less than this time last year.

The network’s numbers show that almost 34% of Texas senior class – approximately 373,000 – has completed the application. Since the Class of 2022, Texas has mandated that high school seniors submit a FAFSA, the Texas Application for State Financial Aid, known as TASFA, or sign an opt-out form.

In an effort to make the FAFSA process easier, Congress passed the . The new application was to be more user-friendly with fewer questions (36 down from 108). It also was supposed to expand the eligibility for federal financial aid.

The U. S. Department of Education released information late last year that the number of Texas students eligible for a Pell Grant under the new FAFSA would increase by almost 51,300, and the ones who would earn the maximum Pell amount would grow to about 132,700. A Pell Grant is federal need-based aid awarded to millions of students annually.

The DOE normally releases the FAFSA on Oct. 1, but this cycle’s forms were not released until the last week of 2023. Since its launch, the application has suffered several setbacks because of technology and human error.

Financial aid offers lag behind

Karla Cid, 18, and her mother, Veronica Cid, traveled from Fabens to participate in last weekend’s FAFSA Workshop. The parent did not have a Social Security number and the pair sought a way to create and verify the mother’s account.

“This is confusing to everyone,” said Veronica Cid, who, like her daughter, spoke through an interpreter. “No one can help. We’re all in the same boat.”

Cid, a first-year psychology student at EPCC, said she filled out last year’s FAFSA form and earned a Pell grant for almost $3,700. The 2023 Fabens High School graduate questioned why the government had to change the process.

“If I don’t fill out the FAFSA, I can’t go to school,” said the younger Cid, who works for a fast-food franchise in Fabens. “I’m stressed. If I have to pay out of pocket, will I need to work more?”

Despite her application ordeal, she was confident things would work out. Her Plan B is to take fewer courses and go part time.

Ian Valdez, a college and career adviser at Socorro High School through Advise Texas, said that he was aware that one of his students had received an aid offer from a four-year institution. Results of a survey done last week by the showed that 16% of public universities had started to send aid offers, while 54% of higher education institutions had not packaged aid offers yet. It also reported that at this point in a typical year, more than 80% of the institutions would have sent their aid offers to students.

Valdez said that among the main issues his students have shared during this FAFSA cycle included mixed-status families, or families with members of varying legal status, and poorly worded questions.

Another problem Valdez noted was the students’ procrastination. He said that about one in six have not even started to fill out their FAFSA despite his nudges and assurance of his help to get it done.

“They don’t know how easy it can be,” said Valdez, who volunteered at the workshop. Under the best circumstances, applications can be completed in 30 minutes or less. “If there is a problem, we can set up a one-on-one with them and their parents.”

‘We’ll fix the problems’

EPCC and UTEP echoed that suggestion. Officials asked students who need help with their FAFSA, especially to address challenges, to contact their institutions’ enrollment or financial aid offices.

“We’ll work with the families with questions, and we’ll fix the problems,” said Ines Lopez, EPCC’s executive director Student Financial Aid.

UTEP and EPCC officials said that their institutions had accepted fewer FAFSA forms than normal for this time of year, but were confident that the numbers would recover before the start of the fall 2024 semester.

“The (high) schools have reached out to us because their (FAFSA) completion numbers are low,” said Carlos Amaya, EPCC vice president of Student & Enrollment Services. “They wanted more FAFSA nights and we’re going to help them to beef up their numbers.”

Additionally, UTEP plans to conduct application workshops for its continuing students the week of April 29.

Amanda Vasquez-Vicario, UTEP vice president for Enrollment Management, said the university had received about 19,000 FAFSA forms so far. At this time last year, they had 25,000.

Vasquez-Vicario said she is “cautiously optimistic” in part because the institution has seen a slow but steady increase in the FAFSA forms from first-time college students.

The UTEP official said that her team tells students that there is no need to panic, but some, especially those from mixed-status families, are the most anxious. They wonder if they will get the necessary financial aid, she said.

Vasquez-Vicario said the enrollment staff assures students of the university’s commitment to help, and suggests alternative sources of financial aid such as UTEP’s Paydirt Promise program where most students from families with incomes of $80,000 or less could be eligible to attend UTEP and not have to pay tuition and mandatory fees.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

North Dakota state agencies are urging high school students to turn in their FAFSA applications amid a roughly 30% drop in statewide applications to the federal financial assistance program compared to 2023.

The North Dakota University System, Bank of North Dakota, North Dakota Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, Department of Public Instruction and Governor’s Office have put together resources to encourage high school seniors across the finish line — including a new on the Bank of North Dakota’s website.

To that end, Gov. Doug Burgum on Monday officially declared this week “Finish the FAFSA Week.”

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The FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, is the main way students access federal loans, grants and work-study funding to help with college tuition costs.

In December, the U.S. Department of Education introduced an updated version of the FAFSA — one the agency said would be easier than ever to apply to.

Brenda Zastoupil, director of financial aid for the North Dakota University System, called it the most significant change to the program in roughly 40 years. Implementation has been rocky, she said. Unforeseen snags in the application process have made it difficult for students to complete the FAFSA properly.

“That caused significant delays for not only the institutions to receive the FAFSA results, and then subsequently issue award letters to students, but it also obviously caused a delay for families to really understand and be fully transparent on what their awards will be for the upcoming fall semester,” Zastoupil said.

Those issues have coincided with a nationwide drop in FAFSA applications.

In North Dakota, about 27.8% fewer high school seniors had completed FAFSA applications as of April 12 compared to the same time a year ago, according to an analysis of Office of Federal Student Aid data by the National College Attainment Network.

Nationally, applications had fallen by 36% as of April 12 compared to last year, the nonprofit found.

Zastoupil said North Dakota institutions are worried about a drop-off of students who decide to postpone attending college because of all the tangles in the FAFSA process.

The Bank of North Dakota, the North Dakota University System, and a handful of North Dakota colleges and universities are offering extended hours Monday through Thursday to help students and families with applications. The bank will also host a webinar on the FAFSA on Tuesday from 7-8 p.m.

To view a list of the institutions’ office hours and contact info, and to register for the webinar, visit the Bank of North Dakota’s FAFSA .

Mark Hagerott, chancellor of the North Dakota University System, said in a Monday announcement from the Governor’s Office that some North Dakota colleges and universities are moving back enrollment deadlines to accommodate delayed FAFSA applications.

While not everything with the application process has been fixed, Zastoupil encouraged students to get their FAFSAs done as soon as possible. Often, higher ed institutions only have a limited amount of financial aid per school year, she said.

“For instance, our office administers the North Dakota State Grant,” she said. “And that is a need-based grant, so we use FAFSA data, but it’s also limited so once our funds are exhausted, we wouldn’t be able to issue additional awards for students.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. North Dakota Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Amy Dalrymple for questions: info@northdakotamonitor.com. Follow North Dakota Monitor on and .

While applications for federal student aid dropped by double digits across all 50 states this year, those with universal FAFSA completion policies seemed to fare slightly better, with the majority performing in the top half of the country.

Of the 10 states with the highest completion rates, three — Louisiana, Illinois and New Hampshire — have mandatory FAFSA policies for high school seniors. Across all states, Connecticut had the highest completion rate among high school seniors and Alaska had the lowest, according to the

Indiana saw the smallest change year-over-year in its completion rate and Tennessee had the greatest year-over-year swing, with a 44.3% drop — though it still had the second-highest completion rate in the country. Typically, the stronger states were last year, the further they fell this year, according to the network.

Experts attribute this relative success to the mandatory states having supportive infrastructure that provided students with the tools they needed to navigate the submission process in what has turned into a notoriously problem-ridden year.     

But no state has emerged from the process unscathed. 

“While there is certainly some variation across the states, the pattern holds,” said Katharine Meyer, fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center of Education Policy. “Where submissions are down, completions are down. There are large gaps between the high-income and low-income high schools and then it’s just the magnitude to which those play out in different states.”

This year marked the release of the new form following the , which was meant to streamline and simplify the historically complicated application for federal student aid, expand access to Federal Pell Grants for low-income students and change the way expected family contribution is calculated. But a botched rollout marred by delays and technical glitches — particularly for students whose parents are undocumented and don’t have Social Security numbers — has led to a dramatic drop in the number of students who have been able to submit the form. That’s left seniors in a lurch and both high schools and colleges scrambling.

Not all students have been impacted equally, though. Among those at higher-income schools — where fewer than half of students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch — about 36% completed the FAFSA this year, while only about a quarter of students at lower-income schools have, according to the college attainment network. The year-over-year drop is also significantly higher for students at low-income schools with an almost 10-point difference. 

“It’s the lowest-income students, the first-generation students, who don’t have additional resources to guide them through this process, who are ultimately paying the price for this rollout,” said Meyer, “which is awful because the entire goal of the FAFSA Simplification Act was to target and support those students and make this an easier process.”

While there have always been gaps between students who have extra support and those who don’t, the added complexities and “minefields to navigate” on this year’s form exacerbated them, she added.
Overall, there’s been a in the number of forms submitted as compared to the same time last year, according to ����Ӱ��’s analysis of U.S. Department of Education data, and a in the number of forms that have been completed without errors, according to the college attainment network, whose members include school districts and nonprofits.

As of April 9, 16% of FAFSA applications still needed student corrections and about 30% of forms were potentially impacted by processing or data errors, according to a released by the U.S. Department of Education.

The completion rates are of particular significance, according to Bill DeBaun, the network’s senior director of data and strategic initiatives.

“Completions remain the target for NCAN and our members, and it’s what we’re encouraging the field to pursue,” he wrote to ����Ӱ��. “Having a college-intending student who was motivated enough to submit the FAFSA, but who did not connect with financial aid because of an error that they didn’t correct, is a tragic outcome.”

Sheri Crigger, a college counselor at the School of Cyber Technology and Engineering in Huntsville, Alabama, said the biggest challenge is for students who still don’t have FAFSA results or aid packages from schools, even as the traditional May 1 decision day deadline quickly approaches. Normally by now, she said, kids would be announcing where they’re headed in the fall and wearing their new schools’ colors. Instead, she said, there’s just a feeling of uncertainty.

“I feel for them because there’s not a fix for that until they have the information they need,” she said. “I like to be able to kind of point them in a direction [but this year] there is no direction.”

Changing the mindset from optional to required

Nationally, seven states — Illinois, California, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Indiana and New Hampshire — have implemented universal FAFSA policies and five additional ones — Connecticut, New Jersey, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma — have passed them, according to the network. Louisiana, which was the first state to implement a universal FAFSA policy in 2018, to roll theirs back this year. State lawmakers said they were reversing course for a range of reasons, including arguments that the policy prioritized college over trade schools — although federal aid can often be used for the latter — and that completion is a for families.

Elizabeth Morgan, the attainment network’s chief external relations officer, disagreed with their line of thinking.

“Universal FAFSA is not about penalizing students or holding students back,” she said. “It’s about changing the mindset from optional to required.”

Students — especially those from lower-income backgrounds — don’t always realize that financial aid is available to them until they submit their FAFSA form, Morgan added. They also might not know that the aid can be used at institutions other than four-year universities, such as trade schools and community colleges. Filling out FAFSA, she said, is important for these students because it fixes these misconceptions.
In states where there are mandates or universal FAFSA rules, schools are more likely to integrate support for completion into the school day and create more of a culture around it, leading to a significant increase in filing, according to Meyer, the Brookings fellow. Events such as FAFSA drives can also help to in a typical year by providing families with the tools they need to navigate the cumbersome, complex process.

When looking at the list of top submitters this year, a lot of them are states that have these mandates in place, Meyer said, suggesting that universal policies may have helped insulate them — and their students — during the messy rollout.

“They still aren’t good FAFSA submission and completion numbers… but it is less bad than in some other states,” she said.

Some experts in the field remain anxious that this will be an ongoing issue in future years. Meyer warned that there are already signs that next year’s form won’t be released on time once again. If the form is delayed but not riddled with errors, she added, students may still avoid this year’s chaos, especially since institutions are staffing up in anticipation.

“I do think long term I am an optimist,” she said. “I’m hopeful that this act will ultimately increase college access for those students, but it’s a bumpy couple of years in the process.”

But one person feels especially perturbed by the botched implementation of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.

Lamar Alexander — former governor of Tennessee, U.S. education secretary and Republican leader of the Senate education committee — thought the would be his legacy.

He was so bound up with the quest to streamline the process that he became known for  the 108-question paper form at press conferences.

“There are not many things that happen in Washington, D.C., that really improve the lives of 20 million American families every year,” he told ����Ӱ�� last week. “This did, and once they implement it properly, it will be a great relief to these families.” 

But the string of delays and mean that three months after the rollout, some high school seniors still don’t know if they’ll be able to afford college.

“I’m very disappointed with it,” he said. “​​If they spent more time figuring out how to implement FAFSA and less time forgiving student loans, they might have done better.”

Alexander, 83, served as governor of Tennessee from 1979 to 1987 and then as president of the University of Tennessee until President George H. W. Bush appointed him as education secretary. But he said it wasn’t until he was in the Senate that he understood how much of a barrier the form was to some students getting into and completing college.

In a brief interview, Alexander discussed how he would have handled the rollout differently, his ongoing work advocating for higher education in Tennessee and writing his political memoirs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: For readers who don’t know the history, why was simplifying the FAFSA so important to you?

Lamar Alexander: In 2005, the third year I was a senator, a group of college presidents from Tennessee came to see me and explained that the complexity of the 108-question form was the single biggest obstacle to low-income students going to college. It was difficult to fill out and many low-income students needed to get their grandmother’s tax returns. Maybe she didn’t have them or didn’t want to give them. They talked about the verification process, which means that if you made a mistake on the form you might lose your Pell Grant in the middle of your first semester. I was too junior at that time to do much about it, but 10 years later when I became the ranking Republican on the education committee I got busy on it. 

As time went on, Gov. Bill Haslam in Tennessee signed offering two years of free tuition for community colleges. Filling out the FAFSA was the single biggest obstacle to two years of free tuition for Tennesseans going to college. When I had a hearing on it — I can still remember the day — we had witnesses from many different points of view, and I asked four witnesses to write a letter each explaining what they would do. They looked at each other and said, “We don’t have to write four letters. We can write one. We all agree.”

Did your frustration with the process begin when you were a university president?

I didn’t pay that much attention. I didn’t really see the size of the problem. I didn’t know it affected 20 million families every year. What people forget is you have to fill this out every year, and it’s easy to make a mistake. That means it’s easy to lose your scholarship. 

How much have you paid attention to the chaos that has unfolded over the past few months?

I hear about it first hand — the problems it’s causing right now with admissions officers who are having a hard time telling families how much financial aid they’ll receive and families who are having a hard time deciding what school they can attend. I’m hearing a lot about it, not so much from the news. 

There’s really no excuse for it. The problem is not the law. The law was thoroughly vetted.

If you were still leading the department, how do you think you would have handled the implementation? 

If McDonald’s has a new hamburger, they don’t roll it out to the whole country. They test it in a few markets, sometimes for a long time. This is too important to 20 million families just to throw a big mess out to them. That would have been the wise thing to do, to say, “OK, we’re going to gradually begin to implement this, and we’re going to test it and make sure it works. And then within a year or two more, we’ll make it available to all 20 million families.” 

I’m very disappointed with it. ​​If they spent more time figuring out how to implement FAFSA and less time forgiving student loans, they might have done better. 

Do you miss being in the U.S. Senate? 

I miss my friends, but I had 18 years. That’s long enough, and I’ve moved on to other things.

When I was in the Senate, I would tell people, “It’s hard to get here. It’s hard to stay here, and while you’re here you might as well try to accomplish something. And you can’t accomplish anything in the Senate unless you get 60 votes.” I learned how to count in the Maryville City Schools. So you have to work across the aisle if you want to get a result. There’s no reason to run if all you want to do is make a speech. You can do that at home.

How are you spending your time now?

I’m on the . Number two, I’m helping the University of Tennessee create the , which was just officially dedicated. And number three, I’m helping Maryville College, in my hometown, create a . It will have an environmental education program, which fits. We’re right in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, which is one of the most biodiverse places in the world. I’ve gotten drawn back into higher education without trying.

I’m also writing a memoir. I’m about finished with that. I kept a diary, so there are lots of interesting stories, interesting people, lots of things that I got to work on that didn’t make much news — like fixing FAFSA — but helped a lot of people.

At Noble Street College Prep, counselors are urging seniors to log into their Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, daily to check on the status. As the U.S. Department of Education scrambles to correct months of mistakes, changes in the system can pop up unexpectedly.

“Updates happen in the middle of the night, sometimes in the middle of class,” said Michelle Ganti, dean of college counseling at the Chicago charter school.

In New York, the school district will join with to host evening and weekend FAFSA sessions for students and families where they can get help from college representatives and financial aid experts. 

Similar FAFSA support activities will be underway nationwide. But is it too little, too late?

A Wednesday House billed as a response to the “FAFSA fail” attracted bitter attention to the department’s missteps from of the aisle.

“We need weeks of action,” said Kim Cook, CEO of the National College Attainment Network, told Congress Wednesday. “We’ll have to look for ways to continue to support and access students through the summer.”

Education Department officials say they “will continue to listen and be responsive to groups and advocates … who are helping students and families navigate the challenges.” 

They’re encouraging more in-person events as well as email campaigns and text reminders to nudge families to submit the FAFSA. The concerted effort might boost completion rates, which are still compared with last year. But with this year’s application process beset by delays and miscalculations, experts — and educators already helping students navigate the chaos — aren’t convinced everything will go smoothly. And they say time is short to get the neediest students the assistance they need.

“It’s hard for all of us not to be cynical in front of families and to really stay as positive as possible,” said Kim Nauer, a financial aid expert at The New School in New York. She’s in constant communication with counselors across the city and runs a to keep families updated on the ever-changing situation. Case in point: As she spoke to a 74 reporter Thursday, the FAFSA website began allowing users to make corrections on their forms for the first time.

Those hardest hit by the delays include students who are likely to opt out of college altogether this year and institutions that might because they rely on low-income students who depend on federal Pell grants. 

Experts are also increasingly worried that aftershocks of the debacle could be felt for years to come — starting with the next financial aid cycle for the 2025-26 academic year.

In a normal year, the department would have released a paper version of the form by now to allow the public to comment on changes before the new application opens Oct. 1. While the modifications won’t be as drastic as this year’s, there are typically some wording changes. But with officials tied up trying to get corrected financial information to students and colleges for this fall, that new form isn’t out yet, potentially creating another time crunch for next year’s seniors.

Mark Kantrowitz, who leads , told members of the higher education subcommittee Wednesday that he “[lacks] confidence” the department will be able to get the process back on track.

‘Moving full speed’

In a statement, a spokesperson said the department’s Federal Student Aid office “has prioritized the overhaul of the FAFSA form and has been moving full speed to implement the bipartisan law to make this experience far better for those completing the form.” On Monday, Deputy Secretary Cindy Marten will participate in a for families, hosted by the National Parents Union.

The series of failures began last October when the department was unable to make what the administration renamed a “Better FAFSA” ready for the typical application window. In a “soft launch,” the form became available in December, but technical glitches prevented many students from completing it, particularly those with undocumented parents who lack social security numbers. 

In February, the department released a designed to allow parents affected to complete their portion, but Nauer, in New York, said, “In order to know that that seven-page sheet exists, you have to have a counselor who’s telling you about it.” 

, and some, were further outraged in January when the department until March the date to send students’ financial information to colleges, giving them far less time to turn around financial aid offers before deciding which school to attend — a deadline that typically falls on May 1.. Even then, some of the data , keeping families and schools in limbo.

On Tuesday, the department’s Federal Student Aid office the extent of the damage and detailed officials’ attempts to undo it. Students need to make corrections on roughly 16% of applications. Processing errors are affecting about 30% of the forms, and about 20% require corrected tax information . 

Rachelle Feldman, vice provost of enrollment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spelled out the consequences of the delays during this week’s hearing. 

“I really worry that we will lose the lowest-income, high-talent students, that they’ll choose not to enroll in college,” she told Democratic Rep. Alma Adams of North Carolina. “That will be bad for the entire economic and social mobility of our state.”

‘An incredible strain’

The troubled application period comes as college enrollment rates continue to reel from the pandemic, when the number of undergraduates entering colleges and universities declined by In her comments, Cook expressed concern that this year’s drop could be just as dramatic, and said a million more high school seniors nationally would need to complete applications by June 30 to hit last year’s submission rate.

With the end of the school year just weeks away in some parts of the country, she stressed time was limited to help students whose forms are incomplete or need corrections. “Time really has to be well spent with the students that we still have access to,” she said.

At North County Union High School in Newport, Vermont, just south of the Canadian border, that works out to about 170 seniors, including many who would be the first in their families to go to college.

Counselors from the Vermont Student Assistance Corp.’s have worked to help students get over the hurdles in this year’s process, said Principal Chris Young. 

“But my biggest concern is that they just are going to give up,” he said. Even “very well-educated families” can’t make decisions about which admission offers to accept, he said. “It’s an incredible strain on families.”

He said about 70% of his school’s seniors typically go to college, with most attending schools in Vermont and Maine and some heading south to warmer climates in the Carolinas or Florida. For about one-tenth of those students, financial aid offers determine not which school they’ll attend, but whether they’ll go at all.

One harried student came to him recently, saying he thought he’d been able to complete the form without a hitch. Then, Young added, “he realized he’d filled out last year’s.”

Just one week out from Indiana’s deadline for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, the latest data shows only about one-third of Hoosier high school seniors have completed the form.

That’s despite a new state law that took effect last year requiring all graduating seniors to complete the FAFSA or affirmatively opt out of filing by April 15.

The shows that 33.8% of the 2024 class had submitted the form as of March 29, equal to 30,109 Indiana high school seniors. That’s nearly 6,000 fewer Hoosier student submissions than at the same time last year, and slightly below the completion rate of 35% for this year’s high school class nationwide.

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Still, officials with Indiana’s Commission for Higher Education (CHE) remain confident that they’ll meet their goal of having 60% of high school seniors submit their FAFSA by the priority deadline. Students can still file after April 15, but state financial aid will be distributed on a first come, first serve basis.

“We are hopeful,” said Allison Kuehr, CHE’s associate commissioner for marketing and communications, noting that other data shows improvement “which is a great sign for potentially meeting that 60% goal.”

Bumps in the road

The decrease in the number of 2024 FAFSA filings is a nationwide trend, with only about 35% of high school seniors submitting the FAFSA form across the country as of March 15, marking a 27% drop, according to the National College Attainment Network.

Nearly 48% of graduating 2023 high school seniors across Indiana, specifically, completed FAFSA last school year, according to .

Kuehr suggested two factors have led to the decline in financial aid applications.

In years prior, FAFSA became available Oct. 1. Changes to the application last year — meant to simplify the submission process — delayed its opening until late December and likely caused the lag of submissions.

CHE previously got FAFSA completion data a few weeks after the application launched in October and would get updates from the federal government “almost immediately” during the monthslong submission window, Kuehr said. This year, Indiana officials didn’t receive data until last month, and they’re still “ingesting” those numbers, she added.

Hiccups with the federal government’s rollout of the updated, streamlined FAFSA form have also further complicated matters and delayed when many students will receive their financial aid offer, Kuehr said.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education indicated that about 330,000 federal financial aid applications will need to be reprocessed following the latest FAFSA complications.

Of the over 6.6 million FAFSAs submitted in the current cycle, about that would make students eligible for less financial aid than they are entitled to, according to the education department. The agency is expected to begin reprocessing these applications in the first half of April.

“While we do not have enough information to do an exact calculation, from all the information that we have received, we anticipate that as many as 20% of the students that we have received information from so far will be impacted and will need to be reprocessed,” Kuehr said of the expected impact, which represents at least 6,000 Hoosier students.

Given the issues and delays, multiple Indiana colleges and universities pushed back their admissions deadlines, including Indiana University Bloomington and , which both extended their deadlines to May 15.

Millions in aid still up for grabs

Even so, Kuehr pointed to “success” already prompted by , signed into law last year.

The measure, which made FAFSA a requirement in Indiana, was promoted by Republican Sen. Jean Leising of Oldenburg as a way to get more students to apply for federal aid, given that Hoosier students left at least $65 million in potential federal aid unclaimed in 2022.

CHE and other state officials have long supported ongoing efforts to increase FAFSA submissions — part of an effort to .

The new law made Indiana the eighth state to have some type of FAFSA filing mandate for high schoolers. There are no penalties if a student fails to submit the application, however.

“(The law) requires high schools to make at least two reasonable attempts at providing students with information about the FAFSA before being able to broadly opt students out, so there has been a concerted statewide effort to increase awareness and participation in FAFSA completion,” Kuehr said. “A level of these efforts have always existed prior to the new law, but this year, there is a definite push.”

CHE is spearheading other efforts to increase the number of FAFSA submissions, too, including the to Hoosier students from Indiana’s higher education intuitions.

Kuehr emphasized that CHE also sends “almost daily email reminders to students to file as a countdown to the deadline.” The commission is additionally partnering with the Indiana Latino Institute and INvestEd to host Facebook Live events and answer common questions about the FAFSA in both English and Spanish.

Across the state, CHE outreach coordinators are in schools and communities to provide one-on-one assistance, Kuehr said.

And with filing rates for low-income and underrepresented students especially low — only 28.5% of students from those groups submitting their FAFSA form, lower than the overall state and nationwide rates — Kuehr said CHE is making intentional outreach to students who are part of the 21st Century Scholars program, which provides low-income students in Indiana with tuition and fees fully covered if they attend an in-state college or university.

“Outside of the commission, we know school counselors and higher education institutions are providing their own FAFSA nights for students and parents to receive help,” she said, also noting that INvestEd will continue to host FAFSA nights around Indiana. “It truly is an all-hands effort.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

They’re called “Pell runners” — after enrolling at a community college they apply for a federal Pell grant, collect as much as $7,400, then vanish.

Since fall 2021, California’s community colleges have given more than $5 million to Pell runners, according to monthly reports they sent to the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. Colleges also report they’ve given nearly $1.5 million in state and local aid to these scammers.

The chancellor’s office began requiring the state’s 116 community colleges to submit these reports three years ago, after fraud cases surged.

At the time, the office said it suspected . Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government loosened some restrictions around financial aid, making it easier for students to prove they were eligible, and provided special one-time grants to help keep them enrolled. Once these pandemic-era exceptions ended in 2023 and some classes returned to in-person instruction, college officials said they expected fraud to subside. 

It hasn’t. In January, the chancellor’s office suspected 25% of college applicants were fraudulent, said Paul Feist, a spokesperson for the office. 

“This is getting significantly worse,” said Todd Coston, an associate vice chancellor with the Kern Community College District. He said that last year, “something changed and all of a sudden everything spiked like crazy.”

Online classes that historically don’t fill up were suddenly overwhelmed with students — a sign that many of them might be fake — Coston said. Administrators at other large districts, including the Los Rios Community College District in Sacramento, the Mt. San Antonio Community College District in Walnut, California and the Los Angeles Community College District, told CalMatters that fraudsters are evading each new cybersecurity strategy. 

The reason for the reported increase in fraud is because the chancellor’s office and college administrators are getting better at detecting it, he said. Since 2022, the state has allocated more than , cybersecurity and other changes in the online application process at community colleges.

The reports the colleges submitted don’t include how much fraud they prevented. 

The rise in suspected fraud coincides with years of efforts, both at the state and local level, to increase access to community college. Schools are reducing fees — or making college free — while legislators have worked to simplify and expand financial aid. Those efforts accelerated during the pandemic, when 

It’s not surprising, then, that “bad actors” would take advantage of the system’s good intentions, Feist said. 

Financial aid fraud is not new

College officials suspect most of the fake students are bots and often, they display tell-tale signs. In Sacramento, community colleges started seeing an influx of applications from Russia, China, and India during the start of the pandemic. Around the same time, administrators at Mt. San Antonio College saw students using Social Security numbers of retirees. Others had home addresses that were abandoned lots. Uncommon email domains, such as AOL.com, were another red flag. 

These scams aren’t new. The federal government has long required colleges to report instances of financial aid fraud. Every year, the federal government closes around , including a recent  who stole nearly a million dollars by collecting fraudulent student loans. California community colleges also say they’ve spotted fraudulent applications from people trying to get an .edu email address in order to receive student discounts.

When the chancellor’s office began requiring community colleges to file monthly reports, it asked for the number of fake applications and the amount of money they gave to fraudsters.

CalMatters submitted a public records request for the data, broken down by campus. After the request was initially rejected, CalMatters appealed and received an anonymized copy of all of the monthly reports, lacking individual campus details. 

The reports show that between September 2021 and January 2024, the colleges received roughly 900,000 fraudulent college applications and gave fraudsters more than $5 million in federal aid, as well as nearly $1.5 million in state and local aid. 

The numbers show that fraud represents less than 1% of the total amount of financial aid awarded to community college students in the same time period. It’s hard to tell how accurate the data is because compliance is spotty, with some months missing reports from as many as half the colleges. 

More fraud, in more places

To understand how fraud is evolving, the chancellor’s office uses several sources of information and data, Feist said. One indicator is an atypical bump in applications. 

“If I saw, for example, that a college that only gets 1,000 applications in some time frame gets 5,000, you kind of know something is probably up,” said Valerie Lundy-Wagner, a vice chancellor for the community college system. 

The chancellor’s office provided CalMatters with anonymous application data for each month from September 2021 to January 2024. CalMatters analyzed the data using two different techniques to identify statistical outliers in the application data and asked the office to verify the methodology. The office repeatedly declined.

According to the analysis, more than 50 of the state’s 116 community colleges saw at least one unusual spike in the number of applications they received during that time frame. In the last year, colleges have seen more unusual spikes than at any point since 2021. Along with fraud, however, outliers could also reflect normal fluctuations in applications or the . 

“What we’re hearing is that (fraud) is happening more widespread than people are letting on, but people just have their heads in the sand because it looks good to have your enrollment going up,” said Coston with the Kern Community College District. Many college administrators say improvements in artificial intelligence have made it easier for people to attempt fraud on a larger scale. 

Yet clamping down too hard on fraud can have unintended consequences. More than 20% of community college students in California don’t receive Pell grants they’re eligible for. Administrative hurdles — including the verification process — are one reason why, according to  by researchers at UC Davis. To help, the federal government is trying to simplify its financial aid application, but in some cases, it’s . 

“We’ve overcorrected at times, even in policy, and in how stringently we’re verifying students relative to the amount of fraud in the system,” said Jake Brymer, a deputy director with the California Student Aid Commission. As a result, he said, real low-income students get pushed out.

Kicking real students out of class

Sometimes, the fraud detection backfires on actual students, ousting people like Martin Romero.  

In order to graduate from East Los Angeles College, Romero, 20, must take American history, so last fall he enrolled in an online class where students can watch pre-recorded lectures on their own time. 

He said it’s all he had time for. Romero takes four classes at East Los Angeles College each semester and serves as its student body president. He also helps out at his family’s auto body shop, sometimes as much as 15 hours a week. 

On the first day of class last fall, he said the online portal, Canvas, wasn’t working on his computer.

That day, the American history professor did a test through Canvas, asking students to respond to a prompt in order to prove they were not a bot. Romero didn’t answer, so the professor dropped him from the class. 

“I was freaking out,” he said, and wrote to the professor as soon as he found out, begging to be reinstated. The professor told him the class was already full again, so letting him in would mean kicking someone else out. 

For the college’s Academic Senate, the faculty group that governs academic matters, fake students is one of the top three issues, said its president, Leticia Barajas. 

“We’re frustrated with the fact that some of these courses are getting filled really quickly,” she said. “We see it as an access issue for our students.”

She said there’s been an uptick in recent months, especially in certain kinds of online classes, that has forced professors to focus on hunting bots instead of teaching. Professors now are expected to test their students in the first weeks, asking them to submit answers to prompts, sign copies of the syllabus, or send other evidence to prove they are real. 

Increasingly, she said, the bots are evading detection, especially with the help of AI. “They’re submitting assignments. It’s gibberish,” she said.

The endless, multi-million dollar game of combating fraud

Campus and state officials described fraud detection as a game of whack-a-mole. “When we get better at addressing one thing, something else pops up,” said Lundy-Wagner. “That’s sort of the nature of fraud.”

To fight fraud, she said, the chancellor’s office, the 73 independently governed districts and their colleges all must work together, including those who oversee information technology, enrollment and financial aid. Part of the challenge is that the system is so “decentralized,” she said.

The largest reform underway is , the state’s community college application portal, which will offer more cybersecurity, Feist said. He also said there are other “promising” short-term projects. 

One of them, a software tool known as ID.Me, launched in February. The contract with the software company, , gives it permission to check college applicants for identification, including video interviews in certain cases. Privacy experts have warned that the company’s video technology could be  

To mitigate these privacy concerns and avoid creating enrollment barriers, applicants need to opt in to the new verification software. 

In the first few days after its implementation, 29% of applicants opted in to ID.Me’s new vetting process. Some applicants started the verification process but never finished, said Feist, while others are ineligible because they’re under the age of 18. The rest chose not to verify their identity for other reasons, including many who are suspected bots. 

‘We’re just trying to survive’

In Los Angeles, community colleges have already seen a drop in suspicious applications, said Nicole Albo-Lopez, a vice chancellor with the district. But she’s skeptical the problem is solved. “The lull we see, I don’t believe we’ll be able to sustain,” she said. “They’ll find another way to come in.” 

Her district is now concerned that bots are trying to steal data or intellectual property, not just financial aid. “Say I have 400 sections of English 101 online. There are 400 variations of readings, assignments, peer-to-peer questions that somebody can go in and scrape,” Albo-Lopez said. 

Barajas said faculty at East Los Angeles College are so overwhelmed by bots they haven’t discussed the potential risk to their intellectual property: “We’re at such a level where we’re just trying to survive.”

Meanwhile, students like Romero who are wrongly mistaken for bots must develop their own survival skills. When the professor denied the request to re-enroll, he signed up for the same course in the one format that was still available — in-person. The class met every Monday and Wednesday at 7:10 a.m., and the professor deducted points for anyone who was late.

“It was torture,” he said, noting that he missed two classes and was late to around four. He finished the class with a B but said he would have had an A if he had gotten into the class he wanted.

As student body president, he said he’s been outspoken about the issue. While he was able to fulfill his history requirement, he worries that other students may not be so lucky. 

Data reporter Erica Yee contributed to this reporting. 

Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.

Amid a tumultuous application season for federal student aid, Utah public universities are taking special measures to allow students relying on those funds to plan for their enrollment.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, experienced this year. First, with a three-month postponement of its usual October rollout because of the implementation of a new simpler system. Then, there were calculation errors on applicants’ net worths since the Department of Education failed to take into account inflation.

The delays may have an impact on students’ ability to commit to a school and secure scholarships, housing and early spots in certain courses. However, some colleges in Utah have allowed more flexibility to deal with the setbacks.

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The University of Utah, the state’s flagship higher education institution, announced Monday that it would extend its enrollment deposit deadline to June 3 for incoming freshmen and transfer students to help alleviate the pressures of the ongoing FAFSA complications.

“We recognize that choosing where to attend college is one of the biggest financial decisions a family can make,” said Steve Robinson, senior associate vice president for enrollment management in a . “Given the latest FAFSA delays, we want to ensure all admitted students have time to learn about aid packages available. We feel it is in their best interest to provide more time so that they can feel confident before committing to the university.”

In addition to that, the release says, the U. is offering a more flexible schedule for housing; all students who submit an application by June 5 will be guaranteed on-campus student housing. The May 3 “priority application deadline” will remain in place for those who would like to participate in a first round of traditional housing room reservations.

Other Utah schools don’t have an enrollment deadline, allowing students to register until the fall semester.

Utah State University, for example, advertises a priority enrollment confirmation date of April 1 so students can plan their access to campus housing, scholarships, orientation and class registration, Amanda DeRito, USU associate vice president for strategic communications, said in an email.

However, those who didn’t make the early deadline can still secure their housing and enrollment and later submit their enrollment deposit with the first semester tuition payment.

“We do not want the FAFSA delay changing students’ decisions to attend USU,” DeRito said. “We will award federal aid as soon as we are able, so students have a realistic view of their costs. Until then, we want students to continue on their path to becoming an Aggie and we are here to help them through any questions they might have.”

Salt Lake Community College is an open enrollment school and accessible to all prospective students until the first day of school on Aug. 20, said Ryan Farley, vice president of enrollment management in a statement.

“All current or prospective SLCC students pursuing federal financial aid being affected by the Department of Education’s FAFSA delays will be held harmless and accommodated by Salt Lake Community College,” Farley said. “We have experts ready anytime during business hours to assist with filling out the new FAFSA form and ensuring all students receive the aid they are eligible for despite the FAFSA challenges this year. That will continue up to and past the start of classes this fall.”

Southern Utah University also allows students to enroll anytime before the beginning of the semester, Nikki Koontz, the school’s assistant vice president of marketing communications said. However, SUU is taking action so students feel supported through the financing process.

“In light of the evolving circumstances, we’ve extended our scholarship application deadline until school begins,” Koontz said. “This extension means that students still have the opportunity to qualify for the majority of our academic merit awards, even if they decide to enroll closer to the start of the semester.”

Utah Tech University doesn’t require an enrollment deposit, so the delays haven’t immediately impacted applicants there. But, its staff is following the FAFSA process closely to best serve students, Jyl Hall, director of public relations said.

Same with Weber State University, which doesn’t have such deadlines or deposits, Rachel Badali, news coordinator for the school said in a statement.

“We know it’s so important for students to have clear information on their costs, and we’re hopeful we can start getting financial aid packages ready in early May,” Badali said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com. Follow Utah News Dispatch on and .

With an array of more than 50 state financial aid programs available to college students, public higher education officials are embarking on an effort to simplify those offerings by 2026.

The Department of Higher Education plans to evaluate gaps in financial support as officials consider redesigning the mix of tuition reimbursement, grant, loan forgiveness, and tax programs, said Michael Dannenberg, deputy commissioner of policy. The overhaul is meant to expand education access, improve affordability, and ensure that aid delivery is reliable and predictable, he said.

“So part of our analysis will look at the ultimate unmet need or need of students, whether they are in state or out of state, whether they’re receiving financial aid programs from the state or not from the state,” Dannenberg said during a virtual Board of Higher Education meeting Tuesday. “We’ll try and simplify, and highlight, (and) prioritize those for needy families and socioeconomic mobility.”

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Dannenberg said that developing a “more coherent financial aid system” would also focus on ensuring students complete their degrees and certificates.

Earlier this year, Department of Higher Education launched its Massachusetts Application for State Financial Aid (MASFA), a portal that’s meant to mimic the federal FAFSA form and allow undocumented students to unlock the millions of dollars available in state aid programs.

Nearly 400  have been submitted or are in progress for the 2023-2024 academic year, with another 230 applications in the pipeline so far for the next academic year, a Department of Higher Education spokesperson said Monday.

Dannenberg said at least 34 state financial aid programs serve less than 10,000 students, and more than 20 programs reach less than 2,000 recipients. At least two dozen state financial aid programs are not based on economic need, and at least 16 programs have a median award value under $2,000, he said.

Officials do not want to harm current financial aid recipients, and some programs may need to be adjusted with a grandfather clause to protect them, Dannenberg said.

The deputy commissioner showed board members a list of the programs, with some serving categories of students, including athletes, children of September 11 victims, foster and adopted children, and aspiring educators, paraprofessionals and nurses. Also on the list were recent major expansions of financial aid, including making community college free for adults ages 25 and older and covering tuition costs and fees for Pell-Grant eligible students.

“So we’ve got a lot of programs, a lot of very small small programs, and a lot of programs that are not linked to economic need,” he said.

As the redesign continues, Dannenberg said, the plan is to conduct analyses this spring and summer, and review redesign options with the board in the fall. Officials would then seek input from advocates, experts, and others at the start of 2025, share recommendations by spring of 2025, and prepare to implement the changes for the fall of 2026.

Beyond the state’s financial aid portfolio, higher education officials are grappling with the ripple effects of the severely delayed launch of the updated Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

The form only became available in January, compared to its typical fall rollout, after the system experienced multiple glitches with new funding formulas. During Tuesday’s board meeting, state officials urged students, including those frustrated by the FAFSA’s challenges this year, to still complete the form.

Students need to submit the FASFA by May 1 for “priority consideration,” though officials are considering extending that deadline due to the form’s delay, said Clantha McCurdy, senior deputy commissioner of access and student financial assistance.

The Department of Higher Education is spending $1 million on “strategies” to boost FAFSA completion rates, said Robert Dais, director of GEAR UP, or Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. Dais did not offer examples, and said the department has partnered with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education on ideas to “excite and incentivize students.”

The funding, outlined in the fiscal 2024 budget, can be used on public awareness campaigns and FAFSA “completion clinics.”

“We are targeting Gateway Cities and students from historically underserved populations,” Dais said. “There’s more to come soon, but essentially we just wanted folks to know that the Department of Higher Education is clearly focused on improving FAFSA and MASFA completion rates, and doing everything that we can to ensure that the neediest students are doing so.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Students seeking state financial aid have just two weeks remaining to beat a California deadline, even as thousands  of completing the federal application necessary to get that state aid — a problem that particularly affects students who are citizens but whose parents are not. 

Now a prominent state lawmaker, Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from Corona and chair of the California Latino Legislative Caucus, is fast-tracking a bill to give affected California students additional time to complete the federal application and access more than $3 billion in state aid. If passed,  would move the current deadline from  and would go into effect immediately.

Its  is scheduled for Monday at 3 p.m. Lawmakers realistically must approve the measure before next Thursday, when the Legislature goes on break and reconvenes April 1 — one day before the current state financial aid deadline.  

Cervantes’ bill follows a technology crisis at the federal level that has prevented U.S. citizens from completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, because their parents don’t have a Social Security number. It’s a new problem that only emerged this year and has generated a high degree of worry among the higher education community in California and nationally.

The tech glitch is basically this: The federal online application wouldn’t allow those parents to enter their financial information. Without those details, a student can’t finalize their federal aid application — and therefore cannot apply for state financial aid.

“The Legislature can highlight, double down on how unacceptable it is that certain U.S. citizens cannot submit a FAFSA,” said Gina Browne, a senior official with the California Community Colleges system, , “and I’m personally offended by it.”

The scale of the problem is hard to gauge. More than 100,000 California students last year submitted a federal aid application without their parents’ Social Security numbers. It’s not clear how many of those had parents who lacked a number or whether they chose to not share one with the government. Nationally, about 2% of applicants faced this issue in 2024, U.S. Department of Education officials said.

Remaining federal issues

The department said  this week  blocking some students from finishing their applications. Those include instances in which a parent’s — or spouse’s — name doesn’t totally match the forms both the parent and student must complete. 

The state Senate is also planning to push for that debuted Thursday. California’s public colleges and universities urged a  to support an extension of the state financial aid deadline. Key advisors for the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom backed the idea then.

“We think that extending the state financial aid deadline is worth considering because it allows the U.S. Department of Education more time to resolve these technical difficulties,” said Lisa Qing, an official with the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Chris Ferguson, of the California Department of Finance, said, “the administration is likely in a position to support such an extension.”

But a delay this year may not address other issues with the federal application that could emerge in 2025, said Jake Brymner, a senior official with the California Student Aid Commission.

Parents without Social Security numbers now have to confirm their identity to complete FAFSA, such as by . “Depending on the national political environment,” students “may have some additional concern about sharing family members’ information with a federal agency as they try to seek financial aid,” Brymner said.

Brymner’s implication is that families may worry if Donald Trump wins the presidential election this year. The Republican nominee reportedly plans a  of undocumented immigrants, , if he returns to the White House.

The commission  using another application for state financial aid — currently reserved for undocumented students — to bypass the federal technical glitches this year affecting U.S. citizens. The state doesn’t share information on that application with the federal government.

This story was originally published on .

College students in New Jersey would lose state financial aid if they get convicted of hazing under a Democratic lawmaker introduced last week.

Assemblywoman Carol Murphy’s proposal would expand on anti-hazing protections lawmakers adopted in 2021 after the 2017 death of , a 19-year-old Readington resident and Penn State student whose fraternity hazing led to his fatal fall down a staircase.

That required all middle schools, high schools, and higher education institutions to adopt anti-hazing policies and penalties. It also upgraded criminal penalties for hazing, making it a third-degree crime if a victim suffered serious injury or died and a fourth-degree crime if the victim suffered any injury at all.

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The law was hailed nationally because it has an “amnesty clause” prohibiting the prosecution of someone who alerts authorities that a hazing victim needs medical assistance and a “consent clause,” meaning those involved can still be held responsible even if the victim willingly participated.

Murphy’s bill comes four months after federal lawmakers introduced bipartisan that would require colleges to report hazing incidents annually, educate students about the practice, and alert students and parents to campus student groups with a history of hazing.

Hazing deaths in the United States by any government entity, but an anti-hazing advocate who maintains an unofficial found at least one person a year died from hazing between 1959 and 2021. He found no deaths publicly attributed to hazing in 2022 or 2023.

In March 2022, a Rutgers University freshman fell down stairs and fractured his skull after drinking “life-threatening amounts of alcohol” as part of pledge-hazing activities at Theta Chi fraternity, according to he filed seven months later against Rutgers, the fraternity, and various other named defendants. That case remains in litigation.

University officials determined the fraternity violated Rutgers’ anti-hazing policies and state law and ordered the chapter removed, according to a Rutgers’ hazing

Such reporting was required under the 2021 law, which directed all public and private colleges, starting in January 2022, to publicly post data on their websites twice a year on hazing incidents, including data dating back five years, if available. It did not mandate central tracking.

The reporting can be tough to find on some college websites and the level of detail reported varies between institutions.

The reports show most hazing incidents statewide involved fraternities and sororities. Common incidents included underage students taken for hospital care because of forced excessive drinking, sleep deprivation, mandated house-cleaning, physical beating, bullying, and verbal abuse, while less common reports involved “paddling,” forced miles-long marches in freezing weather, and fraternity members directed to by doing “a robot dance” and “Dragon Ball Z Saiyan scream.”

This is the fourth time Murphy, who represents Burlington County, has introduced the bill. It passed unanimously in the Senate in 2019 but stalled in the Assembly, and it failed to advance in the two most recent legislative sessions.

Murphy didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Her legislation notes that high-profile hazing incidents, including the deaths of Piazza and students at and , demonstrate that additional deterrents are needed to reduce hazing.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .