In response to the tumultuous rollout of the 2024-2025 Free Application for Federal Student Aid — branded by the U.S. Department of Education as the “Better FAFSA” — many states have extended their filing deadlines to give current and prospective students and their families more time to file the form and decide whether and where they can attend college.
Texas, for instance, delayed its state financial aid priority deadline twice — first from January 15 to March 15, and then to April 15. Meanwhile, Massachusetts pushed the 2024-2025 priority deadline for MASSGrant — the state’s largest financial aid program, which requires students to submit the FAFSA to be eligible — from May 1 to July 1.
“States are trying to be accommodating, but there’s only so far that these things can be delayed,” says Jennifer Finetti, director of student advocacy at ScholarshipOwl, a scholarship application service. “In many cases, it’s coordinated with what the public universities within each state are doing.”
Many institutions pushed back the typical May 1 deposit deadline by at least a few weeks or a month, although the federal deadline to file the FAFSA remains June 30, 2025.
[Read: FAFSA Deadlines You Should Know.]
States have also worked with high schools and school districts to host FAFSA completion events as a way to address confusion about the new form. Some states, prior to the late rollout of the newest form in December 2023, also implemented FAFSA graduation requirements to reduce unclaimed aid by getting more students to apply who likely would qualify for funding to help pay for college.
In late April, West Virginia was the first state to announce that the FAFSA will temporarily not be a requirement for students to receive state financial aid.
Jim Justice, the state’s governor, declared a state of emergency and issued an executive order, saying in a statement that he “simply cannot and will not stand by as money sits on the table that could be helping our students continue their education. Our state higher education office has been on top of this problem from the beginning. They’ve done more than 200 FAFSA workshops across the state and ramped up their outreach in every way imaginable. But there’s only so much outreach you can do when students can’t complete the form due to issues only the federal government can control.”
The FAFSA completion and processing delays, caused largely by the late rollout and implementation failures, come at a time when conversations about the value of a college degree are happening across the U.S., notes Brittani Williams, director of advocacy policy and research at Generation Hope, a nonprofit organization focused on increasing economic mobility for students who are parents.
[READ: What’s New on the 2024-2025 FAFSA]
“Making the effort to complete the FAFSA to matriculate into postsecondary opportunities still has a great value and, for the most part, appreciates over time when we think about long-term economic mobility and access into higher-paying jobs and quality workforce positions,” she says. “I recognize that it may be difficult now, but my encouragement for (students is) to continue to persist.”
As of May 17, 2024, the FAFSA completion rate nationwide for the high school Class of 2024 was 41.5%, a 15.5% decline from the Class of 2023, according to the National College Attainment Network. However, it’s “not too late” to complete the FAFSA, Williams says.
For questions about the FAFSA, experts recommend students and their families reach out to a high school counselor or a college’s financial aid office.
“I’ve been telling students and parents that they should be really sitting down talking together about carving out an affordable path to college,” Finetti says.
“The good news is, the vast majority of students can afford to go to college, but it might not be the college they want to go to as their first choice. … A dream school is not an elite school that is really difficult and hard to attain. A dream school is the school you can afford. And so that’s really what I talk to students and parents about, resetting what it means to go to a dream school. For some families, that’s going to mean starting at a community college, which is an outstanding choice.”
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States’ Responses to FAFSA Delays: What Students Should Know originally appeared on usnews.com
