Dive Brief:
The rate of high school seniors completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid hit an all-time high — at 54.7% — with the class of 2026, according to data released Wednesday by the National College Attainment Network.
That record, set as of May 1, came well before the June 30 cutoff date NCAN has historically used to measure each class’s final completion rate. By the start of this month, the completion rate stood 0.8 percentage points ahead of the class of 2025’s rate on June 27.
NCAN attributed this year’s strong completion to an early launch of the FAFSA in September as well as processing improvements, requirements in nine states for graduating high school students to complete FAFSAs, and stakeholders having adjusted to an updated version of the form.
Dive Insight:
The class of 2026’s FAFSA completions are ahead in every U.S. state compared to last year, according to NCAN. In Alaska, Arizona, Florida and New Mexico, completions are up at least 20% year over year.
The head start on completions this spring represents a “remarkable, encouraging turnaround,” NCAN said in a statement.
The rate as of early May is 7.4 percentage points higher than it was for the class of 2024, which grappled with the great FAFSA debacle.
That chaos followed a late-December unveiling of the new FAFSA form in 2023 — which was nearly three months later in the year than past FAFSA releases.
Congress in 2020 had tasked the U.S. Department of Education with completing the first major overhaul of the form in over 40 years by 2023. The FAFSA Simplification Act sought to reduce complexity in applying for student aid and boost college access.
The eventual release of the new FAFSA not only came late but was also plagued by glitches and technical issues.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office later concluded that the Education Department failed to effectively supervise vendors, follow procedures and properly communicate with students and colleges when it launched the new FAFSA.
“We went through some rough patches on the implementation,” Aaron Lemon-Strauss, executive director of the FAFSA program, said at a higher education conference in February.
The Biden administration first brought on Lemon-Strauss — a veteran product manager with years of experience at The College Board and Stride Inc. — as a consultant in July 2024 to help fix the new FAFSA. He took the reins of the program in December of that year.
Lemon-Strauss said the Education Department is now seeing results more than two years after the form’s initial release. User satisfaction rates with the FAFSA top 90% and call center wait times were below one minute, he said in February. This came after nearly three-fourths of calls went unanswered during the depths of the FAFSA fiasco in 2024, per GAO.
NCAN said Wednesday that the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office “deserves a lot of credit for not only the fixes in the process but also the improvements it has made.”
“Changes like instant verification during the StudentAid.gov account creation process for most users with a Social Security Number is a game changer,” the organization said, noting that instant verification allows students, families and advisers to get through the process quickly instead over days.
Simply getting used to the new form has also helped completions, in NCAN’s view. “This is the 3rd year under the new process, which means standard operating procedures are in place, there’s more familiarity with the process, and college access professionals and caring adults around the country are better able to assist with FAFSA completion activities,” it said.
