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 ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, 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.”

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 ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’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 ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “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.”

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.”

A newly-revamped online application requires at least one parent to independently log in and sign the form. But the system wouldn’t verify his father’s Social Security number. When his mother tried, “it just gave us an error message,” he said. 

Those are among the snags that thousands of students are experiencing due to delays with the rollout of the new FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The U.S. Department of Education overhauled the form last year for the first time since the mid-1980s. The changes were supposed to simplify the process and make more low-income students eligible for aid, but students now face a time crunch. Many have already received college admission offers, but don’t know how much financial aid they could receive. Others haven’t been able to complete the application because of computer glitches. And some have watched the disarray and are hesitant to apply at all.

On Tuesday, the department offered a temporary solution for students like Martinez that allows parents to complete their portion of the form, but it could be March before a complete fix is available. The problems help explain why the number of students completing the FAFSA is from last year — and why the department is under bipartisan pressure to speed up the process,

“I fear that many of these students may not attend college this fall due to the frustration of submitting the FAFSA and the delay in receiving aid offers,” said Tam Doane, an adviser with  , a Colorado Springs nonprofit that works to improve college enrollment rates. 

In recent weeks, federal officials have to help the nation’s universities catch up with some of the four million new federal financial aid forms submitted since the new application opened in January. 

They have assigned federal staff to institutions serving high-need populations and set aside $50 million for nonprofits that specialize in financial aid. But some advocates would like some of the money to go to organizations like Peak, or for the department to create another pot of funding forK-12 districts. 

“We’d like to see summer support hours 
 and more resources to support counseling right now,” said Catherine Brown, senior director of policy and advocacy for the National College Attainment Network, whose members  include school districts and nonprofits.

Federal officials say they are providing “targeted outreach” to K-12 districts and nonprofit groups and have created that shows administrators how many students in their high schools have completed the FAFSA. For parents, they’re holding webinars to explain the changes and answer questions, including one set for . 

Carlos JimĂ©nez, CEO of Peak Education, isn’t surprised by students’ low completion rates.

“They’re like, ‘[The application] just opened, and I’ve got some time,’ or ‘It’s a mess, so I’m going to wait a little bit longer to figure it out,’ ” he said. “Hearing about how it’s been bungled adds a layer of anxiety.” 

‘A broken system’

The changes that are overwhelming the system are the result of a 2020 law that . It now includes fewer questions and is intended to make more low-income students eligible for the maximum Pell Grant amount. But the form is usually available in October — not January — and the department said it won’t begin to colleges until mid-March, giving students less time to make  decisions.

Advocates and members of Congress fear the delays are harming students that the revisions were supposed to help the most. 

Republicans called the implementation “botched” and asked the , a watchdog agency, to investigate. 

The situation has also roused the ire of Congressional , who last week asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to ensure that low-income students most in need of financial aid won’t be further harmed by these delays. 

Cardona, in a call with reporters earlier this month, said the work is complex.

“We’re completely overhauling a broken system,” he said. Ultimately, he added, the new process will be “transformational.” “When we make FAFSA simpler and easier, we make the decision to pursue higher education simpler and easier.” 

Those aren’t the words Priya Linson would use to describe this year’s process. 

“Students have reported that their family is sitting on a helpline for hours until it literally times out and they get disconnected,” said Linson, executive director of OneGoal Chicago, a nonprofit helping students like Martinez prepare for college. “That’s the kind of experience that is pushing students to wait or potentially just question if this is even the right decision.” 

Students whose parents are noncitizens have been most affected. Without s, they can still submit a paper form, but that just creates more delays, JimĂ©nez said. 

“If you have ever sent a paper form to the government, you know that’s going to be a four-to-six-week process,”  he said. “That’s a real disadvantage if you’re trying to make a decision on where you’re going to college.” 

At two high schools, Peak runs “blitz sessions” in the computer lab every Wednesday to help students create the usernames and passwords needed to complete the form. Doane, the Peak adviser, gets students to take out their phones and locate the most recent FAFSA messages. 

In some cases, she said, once a parent electronically signs the online form, the student’s signature is removed and they can’t make corrections. 

“It will be months — and additional work — before they know what federal aid they may be eligible for,” she said. Some students, she added, might miss out on scholarships as well. 

In Illinois, counselors have asked administrators to fund summer hours to help students after they receive financial aid offers, said Vince Walsh-Rock, executive director of the Illinois School Counselor Association.

But Jiménez, with Peak, said organizations already set to work over the summer need additional funding to help more students.

“You’re asking [counselors] to either volunteer or get extra hours if you have some money,” he said. “Maybe they would do that, but maybe it’s, ‘Hey, it’s been a tough year. I care about my kids, but I’m out.'”  

Higher education have asked colleges to push their enrollment deadlines past the traditional May 1 “decision day” so families have more time to consider financial aid offers. Some university systems have already . 

But delaying some deadlines, Linson said, doesn’t mean schools will be flexible about tuition deposits, housing arrangements and “all of the other things that pile up once a student gets admitted.”

Across all four-year universities and community colleges, male freshmen enrollment declined by 1.3 percent compared to female freshmen enrollment which declined by 3.2 percent, the research center found. 

Between fall 2020 to 2022, there was a 1.5 percent drop among college freshmen, 90 percent of which are students aged 18 to 20 years old.

The steepest drops among college freshmen in fall 2022 were white, Asian and Black students who declined by 7, 3.2 and 2 percentage points respectively.

“The pandemic disproportionately harmed women, particularly women of color and low-income women, and this is one more example of that impact,” said Catherine Brown, senior director of policy and advocacy for the .

Brown noted that women were often the ones who “stepped up to homeschool, to take care of children, to take care of parents and to take care of people with health problems” during the pandemic.

Stephen Barker, director of communications at said the caretaking trend trickled down to young women who were “disproportionately caring for siblings at home while their parents were working.”

“There were a lot of barriers for girls to get through the school work and graduate from high school. It’s something unique to a lot of girls who would have otherwise been college bound,” Barker said. 

Despite an overall 4.2 percent drop in college enrollment since fall 2020 among all students, the declines have slowed down and are comparable to pre-pandemic rates, the research center found.

The group looked at 42 states and found enrollment declines in 27 this fall. While some states had increases — South Carolina, New Hampshire, and New Mexico had the largest — Alaska, Michigan, Kansas, Missouri and Nevada saw the largest declines, between 4.3 and 5.2 percentage points. 

The decline in freshmen female college enrollment is a “new phenomenon” that may take several years for recovery, Barker added. 

“As the economy recovers and we’re past this need for something immediate for girls to support their family and themselves, then I think we’ll see them pivoting and returning back to school,” Barker said.

Two female college freshmen who did enroll said they could both see and feel the pandemic’s impact on young womens’ secondary school plans.

When she got to campus, Caroline Holtman, a freshman engineering major at Texas A&M University, discovered that only a fraction of her classmates were female.

“There are a few classes I’m in where the girls are severely outnumbered. For one of my classes, the ratio was one girl to every four or five guys,” Holtman, 18, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

“That was probably the biggest challenge going from [high school] classes that are pretty evenly split between guys and girls to classes where all I see are men,” Holtman said.

The initial barriers finding a community of female friends in her STEM classes was difficult, she added. 

“I knew that I’d be going through this degree with very few women, but I really didn’t understand the magnitude of it until I got here,” Holtman said.

Pooja Muthuraj, a freshman at the College of William & Mary planned to pursue a lengthy academic path to become a doctor, but said the pandemic influenced her views on what a healthy family life should look like.

“Having to spend that much of your life at school affects me and my female friends in particular because our biological realities impact us more than men,” Muthuraj, 18, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

“It’s definitely a concern when thinking about having a family in the future,” Muthuraj said after watching her mom struggle to balance career and family.

Instead, Muthuraj plans to pursue a career in health nonprofit. 

“They’re decisions I don’t think I would have considered so much if the pandemic never occurred,” Muthuraj said.

More than a quarter of a million fewer high school seniors have applied for financial aid since the beginning of the pandemic, and the slip is particularly striking in schools with high minority and low-income student populations — an early indicator that the decline in college enrollment among disadvantaged students is continuing.

, released Monday by the National College Attainment Network, shows just over half of this year’s graduating class, 53 percent, had completed a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, by July 2 — 190,000 fewer than in 2019 and the second year in row with a decline. Research shows a between completing the application and enrolling in college.

“The real challenge is there are going to be some assumptions that because the fall semester is going to look more normal on college campuses, that students will just show up,” said Bill DeBaun, the nonprofit’s director of data and evaluation. “College-going is not a light switch.”

While this year’s graduates have until the end of June 2022 to file for assistance for 2021-22, the decline in applications last year was accompanied by an almost in recent high school graduates — especially high among those from — immediately enrolling in college, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

States have moved in recent years to make FAFSA completion a requirement for high school graduation, but the disruption in college advising for this year’s graduating class began the day schools closed for the pandemic. College counselors struggled to maintain contact with students remotely, but some are now stepping up efforts to get students back on track.

DeBaun noted that while the class of 2020 still had almost three-fourths of a typical senior experience — and might have filed financial forms before schools shut down — this year’s class not only had an “entirely abnormal” year but missed out on spring college advising activities at the end of their junior year.

The decline in completion rates was almost four times higher in schools where more than half of the students are Black and Hispanic. In Title I-eligible schools, rates were down 6.5 percent compared to 3.7 percent in schools with less poverty.

Some students have to help out their families during the pandemic, but DeBaun said it’s the combination of economic setbacks — hunger, housing mobility, lack of internet access and having to share learning space with siblings — that have derailed students’ college plans.

“To get students to complete anything was challenging,” said Patty Williams-Downs, executive director of the Houston affiliate of OneGoal, a nonprofit that works with schools in six cities to help students plan for college. “The desire to go to college and not experience what you had anticipated a year ago was flattening.”

Some students decided because they didn’t want to learn online and others were concerned about on campus and taking it home to family members.

FAFSA completion rates were trending downward even before the pandemic, according to the network released Monday. The only year-over-year increase in rates since 2012-13 came in 2017-18. In that year, Federal Student Aid made the form available three months earlier and began allowing applications to submit tax return information from the prior year, but those incentives didn’t stop a pandemic-related decline.

Requiring FAFSA completion for high school graduation has been a more recent state policy trend, with the goal of removing barriers to college enrollment.

Louisiana, which became the first state to require FAFSA completion for graduation in 2018, has so far this year with almost 74 percent of the senior class, followed by Tennessee at 72 percent and Washington, D.C. with 69 percent.

states have since either passed or considered legislation, but such requirements, DeBaun said, should come with training and support for counselors and school personnel helping students through the process. He’s encouraged by a that provides grants to districts that make FAFSA completion a graduation requirement. And in Michigan, education officials plan to spend federal relief funds on hiring more high school counselors and have made FAFSA outreach to families part of their .

With college planning, “relationships pre-COVID mattered and post-COVID definitely matter,” said Williams-Downs. OneGoal teachers begin focusing on college readiness in students’ junior year and continue through the transition to college. The Houston site’s FAFSA completion rate among the 2,500 students served is usually 87 percent. It dropped this year to 76 percent, but Williams-Downs said it could have been a lot worse.

At the federal level, the focus has been on simplifying the FAFSA by slashing the number of questions from over 100 to 36 and increasing the amount low-income students can receive through Pell Grants. But the revisions included in a December pandemic relief package won’t go into effect until 2024-25, than the law intended.

The U.S. Department of Education, however, took short-term steps last week to cut red tape for this year’s applicants, by a financial verification process. The department estimates the change could help about 200,000 minority and low-income students.

“This has been an exceptionally tough year,” Richard Cordray, chief operating officer of Federal Student Aid, said in a statement. “We need to ensure students have the most straightforward path to acquiring the financial aid they need to enroll in college and continue their path to a degree.