Simplified FAFSA financial aid form could help more Fort Worth kids go to college.
Yuliana Perea spent hours last fall sifting through her parents’ tax paperwork as she struggled to understand the technical language in her federal financial aid application.
Perea, a senior at Marine Creek Collegiate High School in Fort Worth, got help from a school counselor via Facetime. But even with that help, it was a challenge. And as she puzzled her way through the application, she knew how high the stakes were. Without financial aid, she couldn’t afford to go to college. She worried that if she checked the wrong box or wrote the wrong number in the wrong blank, she might not get anything.
The process was overwhelming, Perea said. Her parents, both immigrants from Mexico, had never filled the form out and had no more luck understanding it than she did.
“They’re so new to that system that they just couldn’t help me,” she said.
Students like Perea will soon get help from a slate of changes designed to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, making it easier for students and their families to understand. The changes laid out in a federal bill take effect in July 2023.
New form will be shorter, available in more languages
The changes come under the FAFSA Simplification Act, which was part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, a $2.3 trillion spending bill. The biggest change students will notice will be fewer questions. In its current form, the application includes 108 questions. The number of questions students have to answer on the new application will depend on their families’ financial situations, but no applicant will have to answer more than 36 questions. The new form also eliminates questions about Selective Service registration or drug-related convictions.
The new application allows low-income students, including those who are eligible for the maximum Pell grant and those who have received certain means-tested benefits like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to apply for financial aid without having to supply information about their own or their parents’ assets again. That means students in the lowest-income families will have the fewest questions to answer on the form.
The new FAFSA will also be available in more languages than the current version. Where today’s FAFSA is only in English and Spanish, the new application will be available in at least 11 languages.
The new form also replaces the Expected Family Contribution with the Student Aid Index. The change is mostly in name — the figure will still come from a formula based on families’ financial information. The new name is designed to better reflect what the metric has always been: an eligibility index for distributing financial aid funding, not an actual reflection of what families can expect to pay for college, according to the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
Simplified FAFSA could make students’ lives easier
Perea, who plans to major in architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington in the fall, said she appreciates the help she’ll get in the form of federal financial aid. But it was frustrating to know so much of her future was bound up in an application she could barely understand, she said.
Streamlining the form will make it easier for students like her to apply for financial aid, Perea said. She hopes the new version includes language that’s easier for students and their families to understand. If the technical language was more straightforward, Perea thinks she would have had an easier time filling it out. It would have helped her parents understand the process better, too, she said.
“If it’s a lot for me, it’s going to be 10 times more for them to understand,” Perea said.
The simpler FAFSA represents a major improvement over the application in its current form, said David Saenz, chief innovation officer for the Fort Worth school district. The FAFSA as it exists today is complicated, and many students struggle to figure it out on their own, he said, and many families don’t have the information on hand that they need to complete the form.
“It’s like preparing your tax returns, almost,” Saenz said.
Many parents don’t feel comfortable giving out the type of financial information the FAFSA requires, Saenz said. The fact that there are fewer questions may help families feel more at ease with the form, he said, although he doubts the district will ease up on its efforts to help families feel more comfortable filling out the application. Some families will still have to deal with complicated questions once the new version comes out, he said, and the district needs to be prepared to help them.
Offering that kind of help has been difficult during the pandemic, Saenz said. Before COVID-19, the district occasionally offered virtual help to homebound students who were struggling to fill out the form, he said. District officials had considered moving some of the district’s counseling sessions and FAFSA completion events online, he said, but once the pandemic began, the district was forced into it. It was a strategy that worked for some students, he said, but the families with the highest needs are also the ones least likely to be able to attend a FAFSA completion fair on Zoom.
Natalie Torres, a senior at Marine Creek, said she began filling out the FAFSA last October. She’s the first in her family to go to college, and she had no idea how to fill out the form, she said, so she wanted to allow herself plenty of time.
Torres, who plans to major in psychology at the University of North Texas next year, said she got a lot of help from the college and career readiness coach at her school. But she still had to get two years’ worth of her parents’ tax paperwork together and transfer information from the tax forms into her financial aid application.
Having fewer questions on the form could help make the process easier, said Torres. She also thinks having the form available in more languages will help students whose parents don’t speak English. Torres said her mother struggled during college advising sessions because she doesn’t speak English well, and her college and career readiness coach doesn’t speak Spanish. She thinks it could also help if schools had counselors available to help students and their families in languages other than English.
Bill DeBaun, director of data and evaluation for the National College Attainment Network, said the changes were an “unequivocal victory for students.” Having fewer questions on the form means fewer roadblocks and headaches for families that are trying to find their way through the financial aid process, he said.
The simpler version of the form also helps school counselors and other college advisors, DeBaun said. Many students, especially those who are the first in their families to go to college, rely on school counselors to help them understand what materials they need to fill out the form. Once the U.S. Department of Education rolls out the pared-down version of the application, it will be easier for adults to become experts on the form and help students navigate the financial aid process, he said.
The new Student Aid Index will also give students and their families a clearer picture of how much grant money they can expect. When families get that information early in the college application process, it could help them make better decisions about which colleges are affordable, DeBaun said.
“Having that information could shape that decision from every step — from no college to community college, from community college to regional, from regional to something more prestigious,” he said.
Fewer Fort Worth students apply for financial aid
The Fort Worth school district saw a 13.3% year-over-year decline in the number of students applying for federal financial aid as of April 9, according to a compilation of federal data by the National College Attainment Network. Of the 11 school districts the Texas Education Agency classifies as major urban districts, only two — Ysleta and Socorro, both in El Paso — saw upticks in FAFSA completions as compared to the same time last year.
Education researchers say any decline in FAFSA completions is worrisome because it could indicate the COVID-19 pandemic has derailed many high school seniors’ college plans. But the 13.3% decline Fort Worth posted in early April represents an improvement over November, when the district was down 44.1% over the previous year. Fort Worth’s numbers mirror a national trend, DeBaun said.
Part of the reason for the apparent improvement is an artifact of the data, DeBaun said: by April 2020, school districts across the country were in the throes of the pandemic, so any year-over-year comparisons researchers make now don’t include data from before the pandemic began.
That being said, schools nationwide are on pace to regain much of the ground they lost in FAFSA completions last fall, DeBaun said. But if schools keep the same pace, about 1% fewer high school seniors will have filled out the form by June 30 as compared to the end of June 2020. Last year’s total represented a 100,000-student decline over the same time in 2019, DeBaun said, so any decline in FAFSA completions this year represents a continuation of a downward trend.
But there’s still plenty of time for that trajectory to change, DeBaun said. The pandemic has pushed the admissions process out, he said, and most colleges and universities are more willing to forgive late applications this year. So students who haven’t filled out the FAFSA or sent in their college applications still have time, he said.
This story was originally published April 29, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
