Students Get First Look at New FAFSA Form

by Sandy Flores Ruiz, age 18

The new Federal Student Aid form was released in November and is now open to the public. Many people are hopeful that this time, applying will be simpler and easier.

Wisconsin was among the states with low completion rates of last year's form, making universities like UW-Madison change their college admissions decision date. For many students, the FAFSA form is critical because it helps pay for college.

The FAFSA, Free Application for Student Aid, Form determines students’ federal financial aid grants, work-study, and loans.

When the application was simplified last year, it asked parents to create a Parent ID, allowing parents to fill out their side of the form and students to fill out the rest. However, this change made it difficult for undocumented parents to create their accounts, causing delays in getting verification from FAFSA. So, for many families, the part of the form for parents delayed the whole process.

Janet Hernandez, a freshman at Madison College described her experience as a terrible nightmare. Like many other first-generation students, navigating the form for the first time was frustrating. “Getting my part done was faster than completing my parents,” Hernandez says.

It didn’t allow her to create an account for her parents and when she finally got that done, she was met with yet another wall. It took nearly seven months for her parents to get verified, delaying her submission even longer. This story is similar to others who navigated the FAFSA form this past year.

The FAFSA Simplification Act of 2020 was intended to simplify the FAFSA form.

However, when the new form was released, two months later than anticipated, it received negative feedback from students and parents.

The Office of Federal Student Aid aims to overcome previous issues by launching beta testing. This allows ed students to access the form early and give feedback on any issues they encounter so the Federal Student Aid (FSA) can fix the FAFSA Application before it is launched to the public. Students can fill out the FAFSA form for the 2025-2026 school year now.

So far, there have not been the sort of complications reported as last year.

[Sources: Wisconsin Examiner; Federal Student Aid; Department of Education]