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If you still need money for college and haven’t submitted a FAFSA, fill it out ASAP, financial aid expert says

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 16:56:37 -0500

It's almost time for college students to move into their dorms and get ready for the upcoming school year. If that's you and you haven't checked "submit my FAFSA" off your to-do list, take care of that ASAP.

As of July 5, less than half of the high school class of 2024 had submitted a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, according to the National College Attainment Network's analysis of Federal Student Aid data. FAFSA submissions from this class are down about 11% compared to last year's, NCAN finds.

It's not just incoming freshmen, though. Returning college students need to submit a new FAFSA every year to be considered for aid.

While it may have been difficult for students and their families to submit a FAFSA at the beginning of this year's application cycle, most of the technical issues have been resolved by now.

"Fill out the FAFSA. Just fill it out," Jill Desjean, director of policy of analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, tells CNBC Make It.

The deadline to apply for federal aid for the 2024-25 school year isn't until June 30, 2025. But if you're starting school in August or September, you'll probably need to get your school bills — and any applicable aid — figured out by then.

There is currently an $11 billion surplus of federal Pell Grant funding waiting to go to eligible students, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By Kamaron McNair

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Scholarships

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 10:53:00 -0600

Scholarships can be a good way to ease the financial burden of college or fund your education entirely. Many scholarships are merit-based, meaning they're awarded because of a student's academic, athletic, artistic or leadership abilities.

But you don't need to be at the top of your class or a star athlete to win scholarships. Many are awarded based on a student's financial need, and you may even be able to find some related to your hobbies.

Often, some of the best scholarship sources "are in your backyard," says Angela Warfield, principal consultant and founder of college admissions consulting firm Compass Academics. School counselors as well as local cultural affinity groups, churches, clubs, community foundations and athletic organizations often award scholarships. Targeting these first is a good way to stack scholarship money, experts say.

How to Find and Secure Scholarships for College.

But you should expand your search wider, and there are plenty of free websites and apps that can help. Here are 10 websites experts suggest using to start your scholarship search.

Going Merry

A popular site recommended by independent college admissions counselors is Going Merry, which aims to simplify scholarship applications for students. Signing up is free, but students can also check to see how much they're eligible for in scholarships without signing up. According to the website, students have won upward of $40,000.

"I recommend this for students due to its user-friendly platform, which simplifies the scholarship application process and aggregates numerous scholarship opportunities in one place," Denard Jones, lead college counselor at college admissions consulting company Empowerly, wrote in an email. "It offers a time-efficient approach, allowing students to focus more on their studies and extracurricular activities while pursuing valuable merit aid opportunities."

Scholarships.com

This website helps students discover scholarships they qualify for, organize their matches and apply for those scholarships. The recently redesigned website has helped streamline the process even more, says Kevin Ladd, chief operating officer and co-creator of Scholarships.com and a former U.S. News contributor.

Ladd says the platform prioritizes legitimacy, accuracy and ease of function for users.

"If you found it on Scholarships.com, it is safe to apply for it," Ladd wrote in an email. "We thoroughly vet each one, ensuring it’s legit and there are no fees associated with applying. Daily, we are looking at these and checking them against the URL associated with them, looking at the deadline and dollar amount, filtering, etc. and emailing or calling the provider if necessary to ensure timeliness and accuracy."

Scholly

You may have heard about the Scholly app through the television show "Shark Tank," where founder Christopher Gray shared how he earned $1.3 million in scholarships thanks partly to applying to virtually every scholarship he qualified for. He found that for many of the scholarships he won, he was one of a few applicants or the only applicant.

Financial management company SoFi estimates $100 million in scholarship money goes unclaimed each year, and Gray says he created Scholly to help students find that money. Now owned by educational lender Sallie Mae, the app is free and helps students identify scholarships based on their academic profile and demographics.

“A lot of students are taking on way more debt than they have to,” Gray says. “That’s mainly because they don’t know these scholarships exist."

Fastweb

Fastweb is another free scholarship search provider that claims to have a database of 1.5 million college scholarships worth over $3.4 billion. Owned by Monster.com, Fastweb also offers college planning resources and financial aid information.

Fastweb is "the most comprehensive website for students to find scholarships. Fastweb may send a lot of emails after you sign up, so ating an email address specifically for scholarship searches so that your primary email inbox doesn't get flooded.

BigFuture

A platform created by the College Board, BigFuture allows students to search for scholarships and get help paying for college. The website claims to have a database of more than 24,000 scholarships that award more than $1.5 billion annually. The website allows students to create a profile and get matched with scholarships they qualify for.

"I recommend it to high schools because it offers a reliable tool for accessing essential information on both self-help and gift aid search processes," Jones says.

RaiseMe

The majority of scholarships are awarded to high school seniors, but RaiseMe advertises scholarships available to students as early as their freshman year. The website matches students with micro-scholarships, which RaiseMe defines as "a small grant that you can earn during high school or community college and put towards tuition at a four-year college or university."

Students must create a profile on the website and enter their grades, hobbies, honors, awards, community service and other achievements. From there, they can potentially earn money from one of the 300 colleges that RaiseMe partners with.

On average, students who use RaiseMe and meet standard eligibility requirements for a college earn $25,000 in micro-scholarships over four years of high school, according to the website.

Appily

Previously known as Cappex, Appily is another free resource that allows students to search both schools and scholarships that they qualify for based on their personal profile and demographics. You can search for scholarships based on your year in school, and after you complete a short questionnaire, the site filters schools and scholarships that may be applicable.

"This platform provides a comprehensive scholarship database, aiding students in identifying financial aid opportunities to support their search for affordability in a personalized way by matching opportunities with student preferences," Jones says. "It also features college reviews from actual students, offering valuable insights into campus life, academics and extracurriculars."

Niche

Along with searching for scholarships, Niche.com allows students to gain a sense of a school's "personality" by reading student reviews, Hartley says. Similar to other websites, Niche matches students with scholarships that match their qualifications and provides essay-free scholarships, which some students may prefer.

Unigo

Unigo is another website that pairs students with scholarships that fit their profile. The website has more than 3.6 million athletic, merit-based and company-sponsored scholarships and grants in its database, as well as 650,000 college reviews, statistics and other data points to use when vetting schools.

Users can check each month to find new scholarships that fit their profile, with some applications taking just a few minutes to complete.

Scholarships360

After struggling to find scholarships on their own, brothers Will and Brian Geiger launched Scholarships360 in 2010 to help students find money for college. Since then, the website has offered a free database of thousands of scholarships that can be filtered by grade and demographic, plus scholarships that are easy to apply for and don't require an essay.

A new site feature is that all scholarships "are now 'ungated' so that students don't need to sign up," company CEO Will Geiger wrote in an email. "We think that this makes Scholarships360 particularly student-centric as students can go directly to the scholarship website. They can also use our app to check their eligibility and get matches." By U S NEWS

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As FAFSA Completion Rate Declines, Students Could Lose Out On More Than Financial Aid

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 12:05:04 -0500

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, better known as the FAFSA, is your passport to valuable sources of federal, state and college-based financial aid. But if you don’t fill it out, you could lose out on potential grants, scholarships and low-interest federal student loans. Even more troubling, research shows that high school students who don’t complete the FAFSA are less likely to enroll in college altogether.

That makes recent trends cause for alarm. By the end of the 2020-21 school year, nearly 5% fewer students submitted the FAFSA compared to the previous year, according to a report from the National College Attainment Network (NCAN), a group of nonprofit organizations focused on educational equity. That means about 102,000 fewer students have the opportunity to attend college affordably this year.

Here’s why pandemic-era FAFSA completion rates are bad news for students, and how to make sure you don’t miss out on free money for college.

Why FAFSA Completion Rates Dropped

Students graduating from high school in 2021 and planning to attend college in the fall experienced massive challenges in their junior and senior years. Pandemic-related disruptions including remote learning, job losses, health concerns and suddenly limited school-based resources like college counseling contributed to insufficient support for students.

As a result, throughout the 2020-21 school year, fewer students submitted a FAFSA than in the previous year, according to NCAN. That amounts to worse declines than the organization reported for the 2019-20 school year, when the Covid-19 pandemic began. Altogether, between 2019 and 2021, NCAN reports that about 270,000 fewer students filled out the FAFSA than anticipated.

In a survey of parents and undergraduate students conducted earlier this year, Sallie Mae uncovered a similar trend. Only 68% of survey respondents submitted a FAFSA in 2020-21, down from 71% in 2019-20 and 77% in 2018-19, according to its How America Pays for College 2021 study.

Why It’s Crucial to Submit the FAFSA

The FAFSA gathers financial information from students and parents in order to determine whether the student qualifies for need-based financial aid for college. If you’re eligible for need-based aid, that means you have multiple options to receive grants you don’t have to repay, including Pell Grants and student loans with low interest rates and fees, like subsidized federal student loans.

Even if you don’t qualify for need-based aid, fill out the FAFSA so you can get other types of federal student loans. These include unsubsidized federal loans, which have fewer perks than subsidized loans but similarly low interest rates and flexible repayment terms.

Colleges also use the FAFSA to distribute federal work-study funds and in many cases, institutional aid, meaning scholarships that come directly from the school. These can be awarded based on either financial need or personal accomplishments. Put simply, no one planning to attend college should skip out on the FAFSA.

But that’s just what is happening: When students don’t submit the form, they have far fewer ways to make college affordable if they attend school. And that’s a big “if.” According to NCAN’s research, a high school senior who submits the FAFSA is 84% more likely to enroll in college right away. That likelihood increases to 127% for students from the lowest-income families.

Put another way, when a student doesn’t submit the FAFSA, their chances of attending college the following school year plummets—especially when they’re most in need of financial support.

Submitting the FAFSA Early Offers Access to More Financial Aid

Some types of financial aid are first-come, first served. These include federal work-study funds and certain school- and state-based grants. The FAFSA opens up annually on October 1, and if you file the form as close to that date as possible, you have a better chance to receive money you don’t have to pay back. (The federal Pell Grant, however, isn’t awarded on a first-come, first-served basis; if you’re eligible, you’ll get the full amount you qualify for, up to $6,495 in 2021-22.)

The federal FAFSA deadline is much later than school and state deadlines. For example, for students attending college in 2021-22, the FAFSA first became available on Oct. 1, 2020. While the federal government doesn’t require you to submit the FAFSA to your college until just before you enroll, states and schools often have financial aid deadlines that are months earlier. As a result, you should aim to submit the FAFSA as close to October 1 as possible, even if you won’t enroll in college until a year or more later.

How to Fill Out Your FAFSA

The FAFSA is available online at fafsa.gov and on the myStudentAid mobile app. To speed up the submission process, create a Federal Student Aid ID (FSA ID) in advance so that you can easily log in, save your work and sign the form. You must submit a FAFSA each year you’re in college, but once you’ve filled it out, you can renew the form thereafter rather than start from scratch.

If you’re a dependent student, your parents will have to submit their financial information, too. You’ll need access to a range of data including tax returns, your Social Security number, proof of untaxed income and more. The Federal Student Aid website lists the documents you should gather beforehand. Once you’ve completed the form, you’ll get a Student Aid Report, which offers a basic picture of the proportion of college costs your family will be expected to contribute.

While the FAFSA can be intimidating, especially for students who don’t have a parent or another source of support to guide them, there are ways to get help. You can search the Federal Student Aid website for answers to frequently asked questions or reach out directly to the Federal Student Aid Information Center by live chat, email or phone. You can also find in-person help in your area by searching NCAN’s database of resources and FAFSA completion events by state. by Brianna McGurran

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The FAFSA is opens and its more important than ever to complete it ASAP

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 08:41:46 -0500

Starting Oct. 1, current and prospective college students and their families can complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, otherwise known as the FAFSA, for their share of $150 billion in federal student aid (including grants, loans and work-study) for the 2021-2022 school year.

Colleges often distribute student aid funds on a first-come, first-serve basis in order of when students complete the financial aid applications, and this year it will be more important than ever that students complete the FAFSA as soon as possible.

Because while the share of families filing the FAFSA has been decreasing in recent years, the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic is expected to lead to an increased need for financial support.

Discover Student Loans polled 1,500 parents with college-bound teens in early March and again in May. They found that 48% of parents lost income as a result of the pandemic, and 44% said they can not afford to pay for as much of their child’s education as they had originally planned.

As a result, 39% of those who did not plan to apply for federal aid in March, by May said they will. This increased need — and increased competition — means that applying early will be especially important.

“Filling out the FAFSA is a critical step in the college financing process since schools use it to determine eligibility for federal, state and institutional aid, including grants and scholarships,” explains Kate Manfred, Discover’s senior vice president of student loans. “The FAFSA becomes available on October 1, and some schools award financial aid on a first-come, first-served basis. That’s why it’s so important for families to fill out the FAFSA as soon as it becomes available — because it increases the likelihood a family will receive an aid amount they are comfortable with. There’s really no downside in applying early, but there is a potential downside of waiting and missing out on aid.”

And while many families’ financial circumstances may likely change over the next several months because of the pandemic, Manfred says it is best to apply first and make adjustments later, as needed.

“Unfortunately, due to the nature of the ongoing pandemic, the timing at which Covid-19 impacts families may be unique, and things may change after families fill out their FAFSA,” she says. “If that’s the case, there is an appeals process families can take advantage of to update their financial aid decision.”

Don’t miss out on financial aid

“The number of families filing the FAFSA has been headed in the wrong direction for the past couple of years: 71% of families reported filing last year, down from 77% in 2018-19, and 83% in 2017-18,” says Sallie Mae spokesperson, Ashley Boucher, citing her organization’s annual ‘How America Pays for College’ report and implying that more families should apply. “Naturally, in light of Covid-19 and economic uncertainty, we may find more families looking for ways to keep those dollars in their wallets or bank accounts this year. That’s why the FAFSA becomes more important than ever. Students and families need to file in order to be eligible for this aid.”

She continues, “Families might be tempted to wait to file. In reality, though, it’s important to file on or close to October 1, regardless of whether your income has changed. File now, and then request a special circumstances form from your college’s financial aid office. This will kickstart a conversation where you can explain your situation, and appeal for more aid.”

Boucher stresses that all families with college students should complete the FAFSA, even if they think they earn too much to qualify, explaining that in 2019, some 43% of families reported not completing the FAFSA because they believed they wouldn’t qualify for any aid.

But, there is no official income cut-off to apply for federal student aid.

“The reality is, nearly all who apply will qualify for some,” says Boucher.

“We’ve seen around 85% of students receive some form of financial aid,” says Manfred. “And especially in these unprecedented times, we encourage families to fill out the form every year even if they don’t think they’ll quality or need the aid.” By Abigail Hess

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