Former Senator Lamar Alexander had a long-running stand-up bit when talking about the complexity students and families experienced while applying for financial aid. Alexander would ceremoniously unfurl a rustling copy of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form over his podium. The prop served as an effective reminder of how arduous it was for students and families to apply for federal student aid.
The FAFSA form used to be a poster child for administrative burdens, creating a hurdle that families had to overcome if they wanted to get federal financial aid to help pay for college. Many states, as well as most colleges and universities, also use FAFSA information to determine eligibility for state and institutional financial aid.
Some 17-18 million students complete the form each year. Once you add parents and spouses who must provide information for their kids or partners, approximately 40 million people interact with FAFSA annually. So, it should be a no-brainer to make the process simple.
Instead FAFSA has historically been a barrier to entry for many students, especially for the first generation and low-income students who stand to gain the most from higher education. Ask current or former students about their FAFSA experience, and the modal response are groans when they recall the hassles involved. The fearsome reputation of FAFSA as a hurdle to overcome, rather than a helping hand on the way to college, meant students counted themselves out before trying to complete the form.
I work at the National College Attainment Network (NCAN), where most of our member organizations focus on helping first generation and low income students go to college. One of our members, uAspire estimated that simplifying FAFSA would free up one-third of the organization’s advising time. That is time they can use to give the students they serve more help, or to help more students. I used to run hours-long training sessions for college advisors, like those working at uAspire, on the basic FAFSA process, and how to avoid common mistakes, because there were so many places students would get tripped up.
NCAN’s research into why students did not complete the FAFSA showed that 15% were deterred by the length and complexity of the process. That research, using data from Trellis Strategies annual Student Financial Wellness Survey, also showed that nearly half of the students not applying for aid, thought they would not qualify. It was because of these barriers to the students our members serve, that NCAN has long pushed for a simpler, easier FAFSA.
Are you ready for some good news? The lobbying of NCAN members and student groups, and resulting policy proposals and administrative efforts actually made a difference. FAFSA is working better than ever before.
Today, students can complete their FAFSA in as little as 15 minutes. NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker, which uses Department of Education data for completions by high school to create state and national completion rates, shows we are on track for a record completion rate for the high school class of 2026.
As of May 1st, the percentage of high school seniors completing FAFSA has increased by 11.7 percentage points over 2025.
Compared to 2024, the FAFSA process is succeeding across the board, both for high schools with low and high-income students, white students as well as students of color, in rural and urban locations.
Why Does FAFSA Simplification Matter?
I spent the first six years of my career working in financial aid, primarily running outreach and communications for UCLA’s financial aid office. Trying to help students and families understand our excessively complicated financial aid system, and seeing how complex the process was, is why I ended up moving to federal policy work. It was clear that things like the FAFSA, and many other higher education systems and supports, needed fixing at a macro level
You don’t have to work in financial aid for long to see all the cracks in the system, and FAFSA used to be a Grand Canyon sized crack. When you spend a lot of time helping high schoolers apply for aid, you notice all the friction points that make it harder. If students—especially first-generation students— first experience the financial aid system as burdensome, it becomes much harder to convince them that college is for them.
FAFSA Was a Mess: What Changed?
Passing laws is only the start when it comes to changing how real people experience a public policy change. Implementation matters, a great deal, and the implementation part of FAFSA simplification was so bumpy that it would make a cobblestone road look smooth. The significant improvement, compared to 2024 and 2025, is partly the story of a well-intentioned policy change resulting in an implementation failure, followed by an impressive turnaround.
During his first term, President Donald Trump signed the FUTURE Act into law in 2019 and the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020. Implementing those laws required a lot of changes to the FAFSA form, the underlying eligibility calculations for the Pell Grant, and most importantly, massive updates to the technology infrastructure that underpins the whole federal financial aid system.
The changes mean that students now only answer 38 questions today, compared to over 100 previously. The eligibility formulas for the Pell Grant were changed, increasing the number of students that qualify for the primary federal grant program that helps low-income students pay for college. Finally, data sharing between ED and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was enhanced, reducing how many students have to send their tax returns into schools for verification—an audit process that was hugely burdensome for students, families, and college financial aid offices.
The redesign, and the need to completely rebuild and update all the backend technology that supports the FAFSA, led to serious delays in the form (usually open on October 1 each year) being released in 2023 and 2024, along with a host of glitches. On top of the delayed launches, students and families faced frequent system outages, students could not make updates to their information for months after initial submission, and colleges had to submit any changes for students individually, rather than by sending large batch files to Department of Education.
A reform process intended to make FAFSA easier instead generated headlines like this one from the New York Times.
Recounting every implementation challenge would require an essay of its own. The National Association of Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) has a handy timeline of the issues, for those who want to know more.
A highly curated list of what caused all the problems includes:
A lack of focus on implementation from the Biden administration.
Massive tech debt at the Department of Education’s’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) that had to be fixed. Tech debt is the accumulation of choosing the fastest solutions to a problem over the best long-term solutions. Over time, those choices make it harder and harder to keep things running efficiently.
Federal technology vendors tasked with upgrading FSA’s systems messing up.
Congress’ unwillingness to properly fund FSA, in part because of antipathy towards the Biden administration’s attempts to forgive federal student loan debt for some borrowers.
So how did things get fixed? The Biden administration brought in outside help. Jeremy Singer, President of the College Board, was asked to lead the charge. Singer, who has significant experience implementing major IT infrastructure projects, brought in a team of colleagues, including Aaron-Lemon Strauss, who remains at FSA as the Executive Director for FAFSA, after Singer returned to the College Board.
Statecraft has an excellent podcast episode with Singer that delves deep into all the issues and how they were solved. One of the main takeaways is how important it was to have someone consistently in charge of the process. You can’t simply outsource such an important function without having the in-house capacity to make sure the product works. For me, that also shows why career staff are so vital to making government work for everyday people.
Singer, Lemon-Strauss, and the dedicated hard-working team of career federal workers deserve most of the credit for turning FAFSA around.
Building on that turnaround required FSA to maintain consistent staffing of knowledgeable experts . The consistency that the FAFSA team has provided, even as administrations switched, ensured that the work begun during the Biden administration was completed in the Trump administration.
This is one area where the Trump administration maintained state capacity, and can now take some of the credit for a major policy and tech innovation that is making life easier for millions of Americans.
How is FAFSA Simplification Helping Students?
Reducing barriers to college means more students apply and enroll. The benefits of removing FAFSA as an administrative burden are already showing up in application and enrollment data. On top of what looks like a record FAFSA completion year, Common App shows that the number of college applicants for the 2026-27 academic year is 4% higher than the same time last year.
We know that high school seniors who complete the FAFSA are 84 percent likelier to enroll in college immediately after high school. For students from the lowest income quartile, that number leaps to 127 percent likelier to head straight to college.
The data linking FAFSA completion and increased college enrollment rates are correlative rather than causal. But, the link is so strong that it is almost certain that FAFSA completion is helping students see college as a viable path after high school.
The biggest increases in college applications are coming from the students we want to help: first-generation, historically underrepresented and coming from communities with the lowest median incomes. People with fewer resources struggle more with administrative burdens. And so making the financial aid process easier for these students shows that a well-designed universal process can level the playing field and reduce inequality.
Most importantly, more students are eligible for the maximum Pell Grant than ever before, because of eligibility changes that were part of FAFSA simplification.
1.7 million more students were eligible for maximum Pell Grants in the 2025-26 FAFSA cycle, based on NCAN’s analysis of data from the office of Federal Student aid. That increase is a 27 percent jump compared to the 2023-24, the last application cycle before the FAFSA Simplification Act changes were implemented. There has also been an over 1,600% (yes, you are reading that correctly) jump in the number of students eligible for the minimum Pell Grant. These kinds of changes make it clear that removing administrative barriers makes an enormous difference in who gets support, but as importantly whether people who are eligible for support are able to ask for help.
Source: NCAN https://www.ncan.org/Web/Web/News/FAFSA-Simplification-Yielded-1.7-Million-Additional-Pell-Eligible-Students.aspx
FAFSA has come a long way from Lamar Alexander’s unwieldy paper form. There is still more to do when it comes to college access. Fixing FAFSA is only a piece of the puzzle.
Low-income students, and students of color still enroll in and complete college at lower rates than their wealthier peers, so making it easier to apply for aid should be the starting point for continued efforts to narrow the attainment gap between the students who have the most and those with the least.
What fixing the FAFSA shows, even if it took much too long, is that administrative burdens are not inevitable. Barriers can be removed or lowered, when consistent advocacy and political will lead to needed legislative changes, and smart hard working public servants are given the support to effectively implement those changes.
This is great news. Now, if everyone can just fix Medicaid applications after Trump messed that up.