Category: Data

By Bill DeBaun, NCAN Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives

As of the end of March, FAFSA applications for the 2022-23 cycle were down 8.9% year-over-year. More specifically, FAFSA renewals from currently enrolled college students declined 12.3%, and renewals from Pell Grant-eligible students plummeted by 15.6%.

These figures come from data released to NCAN by Federal Student Aid (FSA), and they portend very bad news in the short term for college student retention, persistence, and completion rates. NCAN’s interactive dashboard displays this new data.

View the FAFSA renewals dashboard.

From Oct. 1, 2021, to mid-January 2022, the number of completed FAFSAs (first-time and renewals combined) faced double-digit declines year-over-year and bottomed out at -23.1% through mid-December. Renewals alone were somehow even more dire, hitting a low of -32.8% at the end of November. Pell Grant-eligible renewals saw their steepest decline at -35.8% in mid-November.

Compared to the pre-pandemic 2019-20 FAFSA cycle, 2022-23 Pell-eligible renewals are down 19.2%, which is an almost inconceivably large number seven months into the cycle.

All three categories (overall applicants, renewals, Pell-eligible renewals) saw their trend reverse after mid-January and have steadily climbed since then. But each group was still substantially in the red at the end of March.

Considering applicant income levels, renewals from students with annual incomes less than or equal to $25,000 have declined 16.5% year-over-year, representing about 420,000 fewer students. Students reporting between $25,000 and $50,000 in income are down 10.1% (about 158,000 fewer students), and students reporting more than $50,000 in income have declined 9.9% (about 269,000 fewer students).

No state has a positive year-over-year change in FAFSA renewals. The average decline is 12.5%, while Indiana has the steepest drop at -17.7%.

NCAN previously analyzed renewal declines during the 2020-21 FAFSA cycle two months into the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic caused considerable disruptions to FAFSA completion (among, more broadly, every other aspect of the education system and our lives), but the declines observed through March 2022 in the 2022-23 cycle dwarf those from two years ago. The headline of NCAN’s May 2020 analysis, “Nearly 250,000 Fewer Low-Income FAFSA Renewals This Cycle Nationally” is somehow an upgrade relative to the 420,000 fewer students we currently observe.

These steep declines in overall and renewal applications in the 2022-23 cycle occurred despite the encouraging performance of the high school class of 2022. FAFSA completions for current high school seniors were up 3.9% year-over-year through April 8, driven by strong year-over-year increases by students in high schools serving more students from low-income backgrounds, Black students, and Hispanic students. Another boost came from newly implemented universal FAFSA policies in Texas and Alabama; both states are up more than 20% year-over-year.

What is Driving the Decline in FAFSA Renewals?

There are many plausible explanations for these steep declines in FAFSA renewals, but it’s hard to pin this performance on any one of them.

Structurally, college-going faces some headwinds right now. The hot economy may be having an impact, with starting wages up and perhaps luring students on the margin away from academic programs and into the workforce. Beyond that, there are many factors making college a less feasible or appealing option right now (e.g.,  virtual classes, vaccination and masking requirements, disruptions from having to isolate  when positive, weekly COVID testing). Even more broadly, students may be questioning the value of a postsecondary degree.

Also worth noting is that high schools are having to triage supports to students, with learning loss and academics, mental wellness, and basic needs often getting more attention and investment than postsecondary transitions. Students from the high school graduating classes of 2020 and 2021 may have missed out on supports and foundations that would have contributed to postsecondary persistence and resilience.

More narrowly, NCAN members have noted that the performance of the FAFSA website has periodically been a hindrance over the course of this cycle. Students have experienced outages and error messages and been bounced from the system before submitting their information. Additionally, we note that FSA sent out renewal email reminders later than it did in previous years. It is impossible to believe either of these is a primary driver of the massive declines we are observing, but it is plausible they contribute in some ways that are secondary to the structural challenges shifting students’ choices.

How Can We Help More Students Stay Enrolled in College?

Students still have lots of time to renew their FAFSAs, but this data is especially concerning for what it may signal: a broad shift in students’ intent to re-enroll. Students who leave college with loan debt and no degree face perilous prospects with regard to future earnings and loan repayment outcomes.

NCAN will continue to monitor and analyze this data. In the meantime, we strongly recommend that the K-12 and higher education sectors use their federal pandemic relief dollars (ESSER and HEERF funds, respectively) to focus on postsecondary transitions, retention, persistence, and completion supports, as appropriate. That includes preparing summer melt interventions, contracting with external partners to provide additional capacity where needed, and engaging students to understand how and why their plans might be changing and what we can be doing to support them and keep them enrolled.

In the meantime, institutions, states, and the education field need to examine their enrollment expectations for the fall. As currently projected, far fewer students than anticipated may arrive on campus during the 2022-23 academic year, and that will have significant impacts on those students, their communities, states, and the nation overall.

View the FAFSA renewals dashboard.

By Bill DeBaun, Director of Data and Evaluation, National College Attainment Network

Oct. 1 is a major milestone on every college access professional’s calendar because it’s opening day for the new FAFSA cycle. The good news is NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker is back for the fifth consecutive year to help practitioners, policymakers, and the public track high school FAFSA completions at the national, state, city, district, and school levels. The bad news is for the past two FAFSA cycles there have been fewer completions to track.

The nascent 2022-23 FAFSA cycle, which will represent class of 2022 high school seniors, opens on the heels of two consecutive cycles experiencing FAFSA completion declines. By July 2, the high school class of 2021 completed 4.8% fewer FAFSAs than the class of 2020; this represented about 102,000 fewer FAFSA completions and just 53.3% of the senior class. By June 30 of last year, the class of 2020 had about 81,000 fewer FAFSA completions than the class of 2019, representing a 3.7% decline.

Over the summer, it was a tale of two cycles. The class of 2021 slowly clawed back some momentum and rose to -4.2% year-over-year by the end of September. Meanwhile, the class of 2020 declined from -3.7% to -4.2% by Sept. 11 of last year. Neither case is all that encouraging, but all things being equal we’d rather see an upward trend than not.

This all adds up to a sobering reality: across the classes of 2020 and 2021, more than a quarter-million fewer seniors completed a FAFSA than we would have expected, due to the pandemic.

Unfortunately, declines in FAFSA completion have been inequitably distributed, with public high schools serving more students from low-income backgrounds and more students of color seeing fewer FAFSAs completed than their counterparts.

As previously noted, these figures portend a potentially rough postsecondary enrollment landscape for the current fall semester. The catastrophic enrollment declines reported on by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center came on the heels of both a smaller FAFSA completion decline last year and a larger percentage of seniors completing the FAFSA.

Updates to the FAFSA Tracker

Turning toward the current cycle, there are a few changes and additions to the Form Your Future FAFSA Tracker:

• Most notably, the 12^th-grade enrollment figures used to calculate the percentage of seniors completing at the national and state levels are now based on data from the 10^th edition of Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education (WICHE)’s Knocking on the College Door report. Previously, these enrollment figures were based on projections from the 9^th edition of the report, now they are based on actual reported enrollment headcounts from the states. The update applies to all cycles in the Tracker, and the trendlines in the Compare By Cycle dashboard reflect this.
  • Functionally, this means that most states will see a decline of three to four percentage points in their percent of seniors completing compared to what they might expect. Because high school graduation rates are (and have been) increasing, and schools are getting better at retaining students, the number of 12^th-grade students is increasing relative to WICHE’s previous projections. This means denominators are growing, and average completion rates consequently decrease when we’re comparing 9^th and 10^th edition calculations.
  • A comparison of 9^th and 10^th edition calculations based on the 2021-22 FAFSA cycle shows that moving to 10^th edition data creates a decrease in the percentage of students completing a FAFSA in 48 states. The average decline is 3.2 percentage points.
  • Questions, concerns, and consternation about this change can be directed to me at debaunb@ncan.org
• The FAFSA Tracker is pleased to add a new dashboard that shows FAFSA completions by district and high school. This dashboard is filterable at the state, city, district, and school levels and shows total completions, by date of the cycle, for the current and previous cycle.
• Although the Tracker previously showed year-over-year percent change by public high schools’ Title I eligibility, this year we’ve switched that metric to display comparisons between low- and higher-income high schools. We use the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s cutoff of +/- 50% of students on free- or reduced-price lunch to categorize high schools. We made this switch because of a low sample size of Title I-eligible high schools in the National Center for Education Statistics data.

NCAN remains grateful for the enthusiasm we receive about the FAFSA Tracker, and we are pleased to be able to continue to provide and update this valuable tool. Updates will generally come every Friday pending the availability of FAFSA completion data from Federal Student Aid.

Our fingers are crossed that the class of 2022 will break the downward trend in FAFSA completion declines, and we will be monitoring this cycle closely to provide updates and insights periodically.

By Raymond AlQaisi, Policy and Advocacy Manager, National College Attainment Network

After five years of declining total filers for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the 1% year-over-year increase in filers during the 2017-18 cycle was a bright spot for FAFSA completion. With the release of data on the demographics of FAFSA filers for the two most recent completed FAFSA cycles – 2018-19 and 2019-20 – it is now possible to examine whether the upward trend in FAFSA completion continued. Unfortunately, the two most recent FAFSA cycles demonstrate a return to overall declines in FAFSA filing.

FAFSA completion is a strong indicator of intended and eventual postsecondary enrollment. While the Great Recession prompted many to enroll (or re-enroll) in higher education, it was expected that the uptick in college-going might level out, since the recovery years had a relatively stronger economy and lower unemployment. As predicted, FAFSA filing dropped in all but one of the eight years following the recession.

Notably, positive changes to the FAFSA process contributed to the 2017-18 bump in overall completion. First, the use of prior-prior year tax information on the FAFSA meant that applicants could use already filed taxes from a year earlier. Secondly, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) began offering the FAFSA form three months sooner: on Oct. 1 rather than Jan. 1.

For the 2017-18 cycle, the roughly 1% increase in FAFSA completions represented over 228,000 additional filers.

However, as you can see in the chart below, new data for two recent cycles show a steady but continued decrease in FAFSA filing – both at a rate of -2% over the previous year. Note that these FAFSA cycles have minimal overlap with the COVID-19 pandemic.

We sifted through the large quantities of data that Federal Student Aid released about the 2018-19 and 2019-20 FAFSA cycles. Based on our analysis, here are five key FAFSA trends for the college access and success field, policymakers, and other education leaders.

1. More FAFSA filers are using the IRS Data Retrieval Tool.

The latest data show that a larger percentage of FAFSA filers are using the IRS Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) to transfer financial information to their application. As the chart below shows, roughly half (52%) of FAFSA filers used the DRT in the two most recent cycles. The DRT makes the FAFSA process much simpler and reduces the likelihood that FAFSA filers will be selected for verification, the audit-like process of proving that information included on a FAFSA is accurate.

Unfortunately, data for the 2017-18 cycle was omitted here because during the peak of the FAFSA filing season there was a security breach that prompted the IRS to remove the Data Retrieval Tool option from the FAFSA.

A larger uptake in DRT usage is an encouraging development, as it reduces the time needed to complete the FAFSA and eases the process for students. It also demonstrates the value of the FUTURE Act, passed into law in December 2019. When implemented fully for the 2024-25 academic year, the FUTURE Act will allow all FAFSA filers to use an improved version of IRS data transfer.

2. FAFSA completion is down among filers of all ages.

The chart below shows that, up until the two most recent cycles, the trends in FAFSA filing tracked very closely between filers of different ages. As filing decreased among younger filers, it decreased at a very similar rate for older filers.

FAFSA filing was down for all age groups for the past two cycles, but the “19-24” and “25 and up” age groups experience a more acute decline in the 2018-19 cycle. The “18 or less” age group experienced a second year of small increase in 2018-19, but then a more parallel decline to the older age groups in the 2019-20 cycle.

Note that these age groups are based on the birthdate filers report on the FAFSA and are not directly comparable to NCAN’s #FormYourFuture FAFSA Tracker, which reports on high school seniors who complete the FAFSA. Multiple factors are used to filter for high school seniors in data reporting, and the FAFSA does not ask applicants about their high school graduation year.

3. First-generation students make up a smaller share of FAFSA completers.

The new data show that, over time, students who are first in their families to attend college are comprising a lesser share of FAFSA completers. These results by themselves are not sufficient to draw alarming conclusions. This trend may be driven by changes in demographics – i.e., as a greater share of Americans have attained a college degree, fewer postsecondary students will be defined as the first in their families to attend higher education.

Nevertheless, first-generation students represent nearly half of filers (i.e., potential college-goers) and are a significant student population for education stakeholders to consider in efforts to raise college attainment rates.

4. FAFSA filers are listing more higher education institutions on their aid applications.

NCAN members, such as the College Advising Corps, recommend that students list at least four schools on the FAFSA to broaden their postsecondary options. Positively, the recent data show that this approach is becoming more prevalent.

The past few FAFSA cycles show a considerable increase in the percentage of freshmen who are filing their application to four or more institutions – and relatedly an apparent decrease in the percentage filing to one institution. The FAFSA process changes of prior-prior year tax data and a longer period to file the aid form coincide with more students filing their FAFSA to more institutions. These data show success in that students are considering more options for college enrollment.

Once we have data for FAFSA cycles impacted by the pandemic, this trend will be one to follow. If more students are only listing one institution, it could mean they are perhaps overlooking match or fit in their college search or have other considerations, such as attending an institution closer to home.

5. Federal COVID relief funds can be used to support FAFSA completion.

Given these trends, FAFSA completion should be a top priority for education leaders. NCAN recommends that states and school districts use recently distributed federal COVID-19 response funding to support FAFSA completion.

In total, Congress has appropriated more than $190 billion in aid to K-12 education to provide relief, promote recovery, and prevent learning loss. Considering the federal government spends about $80 billion annually on elementary and secondary education, these funds represent a massive investment and commitment to students and schools.

They also represent a tremendous opportunity to provide students with support that can keep them on the pathway to postsecondary education. K-12 districts and schools are permitted to use these funds broadly, and NCAN’s sincere hope is that many local education agencies will invest these funds in college and career readiness activities.

NCAN’s community-based organizations and nonprofit members should make themselves readily available to provide supports wherever possible.

Please see these NCAN resources for more information: Blog: K-12 and CBOs Should Use Federal Funding to Spur Partnerships, Help Students and Webinar: How CBOs Can Leverage ARP Funds to Support Students.

Author’s note: The data analysis and charts herein are based on NCAN’s calculations, using the “FAFSA Data by Demographic Characteristics” Cycle reports – data available via the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid. (Data accessed in June 2021.)