This year, college students and parents received a surprise in their inboxes. The Department of Education has announced the annual FAFSA form will open in December.
The FAFSA is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. It is a series of forms used by the government to determine which students most need monetary aid to attend college. Usually, the FAFSA opens on October 1st. This year, it has been delayed.
Leanna Davis, the Executive Director of Financial Aid at Rock Valley Community College, says, “Anytime that there’s a change with the Department of Education we anticipate that there is going to be a delay, especially with a change this big.” This is the biggest one Leanna has seen in her fifteen years working in financial aid.
The FAFSA features major improvements this year.
It will have a new formula to calculate how much a family is able to contribute. It will also enable direct data sharing between the department and the IRS as an alternative to sometimes complex tax forms.
Students can also submit individual contributors, who then must approve the sharing of their data. Additionally, the form is shorter. It asks each individual only the questions relevant to their situation.
Along with this, Leanna says her office projects huge increases in monetary aid.
“Nationwide, 610 thousand students who did not previously receive the Pell Grant [should] receive it. And we’re expected to see a 1.5 million student increase in students receiving the full Pell award,” she exclaims.
As a parent of a Rock Valley student, Nicole O’Neill has been in a state of panic since receiving the email with the news.
“I keep literally going, wait, did we miss it? And panic on a regular, intermittent basis.”
However, she hopes these changes will be good.
“If you can go to school and get a usable degree that you can apply to a career, and you don’t come out of it with a huge amount of debt- it’s more than ideal. It’s the way it should be,” Nicole concludes.
Sarah Yeager, an RVC student herself, thinks similarly.
“I feel good that more people are getting financial aid,” she said. “Schooling, I think, is really important, and I think it’s good that more people will have access to it.”
Despite hesitations about the odd timing, she too hopes the changes to the FAFSA will have a positive impact.
The date change is only temporary.
“The Department of Education has come out and said, ‘by December 31st,’ so I anticipate that it [the FAFSA] will not open until [then],” Leanna says. “But going forward, we will go back to the October 1st date.”
The Department of Education will send out another email when the FAFSA becomes available. In the meantime, Leanna urges students to come to the RVC Financial Aid office if they have any questions or want to get a head start preparing for the new and improved FAFSA.
To learn more about the FAFSA, visit: https://studentaid.gov/fafsa/announcements/december-fafsa.
