In 1965 the Higher Education Act was passed under Title IV. Since 1992, FAFSA has ensured that every college and technical school student, who may need financial assistance can submit their parents’ tax information as well as their own in order to receive loans, grants, work study, and more.
According to their website, FAFSA processes on average 22 million applications a year. For the application cycle of 2017-18 students can expect significant changes to appear. This was announced recently by President Barack Obama on Sept. 14, 2015. Instead of waiting for Jan. 1st, students can start as early as Oct. 1st, 2016 submitting their applications. In addition, students will have to report an earlier tax year. This means that instead of reporting taxes from 2016 for their 2017-18 application, students will have to report their 2015 income tax information.
Although the same tax information from the previous year has been uploaded for those who completed the 2016-2017 FAFSA application, students will still need to once again upload their 2015 tax information. This means that if your financial aid information has changed since the year of 2015, you will still need to upload your 2015 tax information not the 2016 one, even if it may be more accurate.
FAFSA recommends that students contact their university to inform them of their financial aid needs. The new updates will not guarantee earlier financial aid award letters. Schools still decide individually when to send their aid packages, but some schools may prefer to send their award letters sooner, being another potential perk of the updated application process.
With the following updates, President Obama and FAFSA hope to make the process easier. As stated on their website, by submitting older tax documents, students can upload it directly to their application, use the IRS Data Retrieval Tool in order to verify their taxes, thus removing the hassle of having to estimate then update the application. However, this might affect financial aid deadlines for colleges, sooner deadlines could be expected but not guaranteed.
The upcoming changes have been one of the many new updates under the Obama Administration. A strong advocate for education, the President has also worked to make the IRS Retrieval Tool accessible to students, in order to verify their information sooner.
According to the Atlantic, making the FAFSA application easier to complete and allowing a much longer time frame for completion will further aide low-income students to receive more financial support. They estimate over 2 million students who qualify for the full $5,775 Pell Grant miss out on the maximum benefits of the new FAFSA. In today’s society where the average cost of college has sky rocketed, every penny counts.
