Seniors applying to college at Edina High School know the Free Application for Federal Student AID (FASFA) program all too well. The process consists of filling out questions about financial history, parental and personal information, dependency status, and many other factors. Following the 2020 Simplification Act, the U.S. Department of Education released the new, and hopefully improved, FAFSA application for the 2024–25 school year.
In previous years, the application has been available to students by Oct. 1. However, this year the FAFSA was made available Dec. 31 after a soft launch period, giving students less time to fill it out and delaying financial aid responses from colleges. “We have these deadlines for college scholarships and they’re having to delay everything because of this,” Edina College Counselor Molly Thuma said. On Jan. 30, Federal Student Aid made an electronic announcement about recent Student Aid Index updates and an expected timeline stating that colleges will not start receiving applicants’ federal aid information until March. “At NACAC, we are devastated by this news. All of the challenges presented by the new FAFSA rollout have the potential to harm the very students the FAFSA aims to serve — those who need federal financial aid to make higher education affordable,” the National Association for College Admission Counseling said in a response letter. 

 The biggest change in the 2024–25 FAFSA was shortening the number of questions asked from 108 to 46. “I like that it wasn’t that long, like there weren’t a lot of questions to fill out. It went much smoother than expected,” senior Mandy Kao said. 

The new FAFSA form also requires everybody who provides their information to create an FSA ID, as compared to last year, where an FSA ID was only required for the student and one parent. Additionally, the IRS Data Retrieval Tool has become necessary for all those who are applying. This means all contributors’ IRS information needs to be imported directly into the FAFSA. “My parents and I were a little bit confused on how I could connect my contributors to my FAFSA forms, it was a little complicated but we eventually figured it out,” Kao said. If a contributor doesn’t consent, the student will be ineligible to receive financial aid.

Another key change is the Expected Family Contribution, which was replaced by the Student Aid Index and determines how much financial aid a student can receive. This no longer takes into account families with multiple kids in college.

The FSA has announced that with the 2024–25 FAFSA, an additional 610,000 students from low-income households will be eligible for federal Pell Grants, and the maximum Pell Grant award will be accessible to an extra 1.5 million students.

“The changes to the FAFSA form represent the most ambitious and significant redesign of the processes to apply for federal student aid and the formulas used to determine aid eligibility since the Common Financial Aid Form — the FAFSA form’s predecessor — was introduced in the Reagan era,”  the FSA said in an electronic announcement.

This piece was originally published in Zephyrus’ print edition on February 21, 2024.