APB: UPDATE ON FAFSA MARCH 21, 2024
How do these potential delays affect my mentee?
Updates to be aware of regarding possible deadlines
Important Information Regarding May 1st Deadline Extensions!
Because of what’s going on with FAFSA, students don’t yet have dependable information about financial aid from their schools.
The Department of Education now anticipates beginning the release of 2024-25 FAFSA information to all colleges in batches, beginning in mid-March - but this will be a slow process with data initially only going to a few schools. Most colleges do not expect to have data until the end of March.
READ MORE HERE
HOW DOES THIS AFFECT MY MENTEE?
THEY SHOULD NOT MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT ATTENDANCE WITHOUT KNOWING HOW MUCH $$ THEY WILL GET. If they are telling you they know their financial aid awards, they don’t know ALL of them - and that means that you should poke and prod, because they don’t realize how much information they’re missing (don’t know what they don’t know).
Some updates you should be aware of:
[1] Your school may not require a commitment by May 1 - many schools are pushing back deadlines to May 15 or June 1 - but not all. Know your deadlines.
Here is a publicly available spreadsheet that’s being updated by Danny Tejada, an NYC college counselor that lists colleges with new enrollment deadlines in 2024.
[2] Your school may offer an enrollment deadline extension to you if you request one - even if it doesn’t say so anywhere. Ask - it never hurts.
[3] Some schools have created new aid forms or processes on the fly to award their own grants and scholarships. Call the admissions/financial aid office and see if this applies to your school.
[4] Many schools won’t make financial aid offers till mid-April.
[5] If your student submitted the CSS/Profile to any schools - those schools’ offers are probably trustworthy (still worth a call to the financial aid office to ensure that they will not change). But you still can’t cross-compare those offers to those from schools that rely on the FAFSA.
[6] AS ALWAYS: About half of colleges practice what is known as “front-loading” - giving bigger grants to first-year students than to everyone else. Colleges attract students with a big discount the first year, and then once the students like the campus and want to stay to finish a degree, they get/receive less aid for the remaining years.
To figure out if a college might be doing this, go to the federal government’s College Navigator website to look at the average grant amount for first-year students compared with that for all undergrad students.
If there’s a significant difference, that is a sign that you should at least ask about front-loading.
The financial aid office will tell you the truth if you ask - they just won’t volunteer the information if you don’t ask.
