A flyer informing Benson Polytechnic High School seniors about FAFSA, April 17, 2024. This year’s new FAFSA was intended to be simpler for students and their families to fill out. But it has so far been the opposite.
Tiffany Camhi / OPB
If there had ever been a year for Oregon’s high school seniors to fall behind on applying for federal aid for college, this year would’ve been it. The U.S. Department of Education’s rollout of the revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, has been plagued by technical glitches, aid miscalculations and repeated delays. Financial aid officers and higher education student advocates worried these hurdles would discourage high school seniors from applying at all.
But despite the confusion and headaches, Oregon’s newly minted high school graduates have been sending in and completing student aid applications at a near normal rate this year.
Completed FAFSA and Oregon Student Aid Applications, or ORSAA, are down by just about 2% from this time last year. As of August, over 47% of the state’s high school seniors have applied and completed both aid applications, according to state data released by the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission this month.
“I’m not surprised at all,” said Juan Báez-Arévalo, director of the Office of Student Access and Completion at HECC. “Earlier this spring, like the rest of the country, we were down with completions. But we’ve had a great number of outreach efforts from our team.”
Báez-Arévalo said staff from his office started preparing for the new FAFSA last summer, learning the ins and outs of the new application from federal Education Department staffers in Washington D.C. This year, OSAC sent staff to high schools, colleges and universities, and worked with nonprofit organizations to host FAFSA clinics. The state organization also hosted webinars and fielded calls from parents and students with application questions.
Completing the FAFSA is the first step any student needs to gain access to federal financial aid, like the Pell Grant or student loans. Oregon uses data from FAFSA to determine how much state aid, like the Oregon Opportunity Grant, to give out to residents. Many scholarships and schools also use federal aid data to decide award amounts.
FAFSA and ORSAA applications overall in the state, including those from continuing students and graduate students, are down nearly 4% from this time last year. But with about four months still left in the aid application year, student aid applications are on track to meet or exceed 2023 numbers.
The icing on top: This month’s figure is close to 5% above the completion rate for the 2022 school year.
“This is really, really good, despite all the challenges from the federal FAFSA rollout,” said Báez-Arévalo. “We are ahead of 2022 and we’re slightly behind 2023. The momentum is there.”
Because HECC’s student aid completion numbers do not include data from private high schools it doesn’t quite match figures from the often cited National College Attainment Network FAFSA tracker. But there is only a handful of percentage points difference between the two. NCAN’s tracker shows Oregon in the top five states in the nation with the least amount of change in FAFSA completion rates compared to last year.
But Báez-Arévalo said there is still work to be done to bring up Oregon’s FAFSA completion rate overall. As it stands now, less than half of Oregon’s Class of 2024 have filled out and completed a FAFSA form.
The federal education department’s so-called Better FAFSA was supposed to streamline and simplify the application process for students and families. When it launched in late December, about three months behind its usual Oct. 1 release date, it did the opposite. People reported the FAFSA website crashing and others were barred from applying for months. Aid miscalculations and information lags from the Education Department forced universities and colleges to push back enrollment deadlines and tied up financial aid packages.
Most technical issues with Better FAFSA have now been resolved.
It remains to be seen whether this year’s FAFSA fiasco will have an effect on enrollment at Oregon’s higher education institutions. At Oregon State University, initial enrollment figures for incoming freshmen have caught up to last year. But the school won’t have final numbers until October.
“There’s as many unknowns still, as there are knowns,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost of enrollment management at OSU. “But everything that we know says numbers look pretty good for fall.”
Boeckenstedt said federal student aid completions are often a better enrollment predictor for schools that serve low-income communities, like community colleges, than for large universities like Oregon State.
And delays associated with the FAFSA are not over. Earlier this month, the Education Department announced the application for the 2025-26 school year will not be fully available to everyone until Dec. 1.