2024 FAFSA Delay
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is a form current and future college students must fill out to receive federal financial aid including grants, work-study funds, and federal loans. Changes to this year’s application have caused severe delays in decisions. Many students are still wondering how much aid, if any, they will receive, and rising first year college students are struggling to decide where they will attend due to the unknown financial burdens they face.
Federal financial aid can be traced back to the 1944 GI Bill which provided funds for World War II veterans to attend school. Federal student loan forgiveness followed in the 1950s. Congress’s 1965 passage of the Higher Education Act (HEA) created Basic Educational Opportunity Grants for low-income students, which were later renamed Pell Grants after Senator Caliborne Pell (D-RI) who helped create the grants. As college tuition costs increased, the HEA was extended upon with Parent PLUS Loans (1980), unsubsidized loans (1992), and tuition tax credits (1997).
In the past, the FAFSA application opened on October 1. This year changes were made to the form, so it was delayed until December 31 at which point it was slow-launched, meaning not everyone had immediate access to it as it slowly opened up to more people over the course of a few weeks.
The changes were meant to make the process smoother; in the past the form has had online glitches and overall has been a stressful process for millions of students and their families. The Department of Education promised the new form would be easier although many students today disagree with this. Additionally, the revised FAFSA has developed a new algorithm for determining federal aid eligibility. The previous Expected Family Contribution (EFC) method has been replaced with a new formula called the Student Aid Index (SAI). The most significant difference between the EFC and the SAI is that the SAI takes inflation into account, which no previous federal financial aid system has done before. The new formula was not ready in October, which is why the opening of the application was delayed. Overall, the general process of FAFSA has remained relatively the same as the form still uses Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data to determine how much aid a student is eligible to receive and the information is processed by the government and shared with colleges and universities.
The postponement in the opening of the application has caused delays in processing of FAFSA forms and sharing the information with colleges and universities. FAFSA stated it is set to release their processed forms to educational institutions starting in Mid-March and a small number of schools have begun to receive this information. After receiving the information from FAFSA, the school must evaluate it. This can be a lengthy process, so many schools have elected to push their enrollment deadlines back to give students enough time to evaluate their financial circumstances before enrolling for the Fall 2024 semester. Most colleges and universities require incoming freshmen to pay their enrollment deposit to commit to the school by May 1. Some schools are pushing this deadline back; for example North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have moved their deadline to May 15 and Mars Hill University and Lees McRae College have both extended their deadline to June 1. A full list of schools that have altered their deadline can be found here.
Ultimately, higher education is widely considered to be one of the most expensive “purchases” any young adult can make. The average cost of public in-state tuition for the 2023-2024 school year is $10,662, the average cost of public out-of-state tuition is $23,630, and the average cost of private tuition is $42,162. These costs only cover the tuition for one year, so when multiplied by four and added to the expenses of room and board, food, and school supplies, it can really add up. Many students rely on financial aid to reduce their financial burden, and when they are unsure of how much their school will cost, they are forced to make tough decisions, like taking out loans. It should be noted that forty-three million Americans have outstanding federal student loan debt amounting to about 1.6 trillion dollars. Seniors planning to attend college next year who have completed the FAFSA form should keep an eye on their FAFSA account and college/university admissions portal(s) and expect aid offers in the coming months.
Sources
Peak Student Media 