TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) — If you have a high school senior or current college student in your family, you may have heard about a major delay coming to the FAFSA form this year.
“The biggest thing right now [is] the FAFSA that is normally launched on October 1, is not going to be launched until later this month. So the delay is making some families across the state and across the country for that matter, nervous,” Bill Wozniak, Vice President of Communications and Student Services for INvestED, said.
The new FAFSA form released at the end of December will reduce the number of questions and change eligibility requirements for certain types of aid.
Although it is supposed to make things easier in the long run, students could see major delays in funding for the 2024-2025 school year.
“For Indiana State, this is a positive because we expect that more families will qualify for Pell eligibility this year with the revamp form and processes and that just means more federal and state funding,” Jason Trainer, Vice Provost of Enrollment Management at Indiana State University, said.
It won’t be available until December 31 and applications won’t start being processed until January.
In a November release from the Federal Student Aid (FSA), it said in part:
“The new FAFSA form will significantly improve, streamline, and redesign how students and their families use the form. For the first time, applicants will be able to securely transfer their federal tax information necessary for the eligibility calculation, directly from the IRS, removing the burdensome and confusing step of connecting to the IRS Data Retrieval Tool for almost 9 million applicants using the tool each year.”
Federal Student Aid
This leaves future college students minimal time to decide what school they want to attend.
“The timeline for submitting your FAFSA and universities packaging and sending out those offers and then ultimately the time for you to decide which school you’re going to attend is going to be a much shorter window this year than historically,” Trainer said.
Wozniak said one of the best ways to be prepared is to have your FSA ID ready before the form is released.
“That’s for the student and in most cases, the parents. Getting that done ahead of time is helpful because that process has a 1-3 day lag for verification by the government,” Wozniak said.
He said the good news is colleges are aware of the delays. They know it’s not the student or family’s fault and will likely have resources to help while you wait for your aid.
“Communicate with the schools because this will be a compacted year and so anything that is a glitch or a delay will be magnified because of this shortened timeframe,” Wozniak said.
To read the full release from FSA about the new FAFSA form, click here.
