FAFSA Simplification

On December 31^st, 2023,  the Department of Education began its "soft launch" of the newly designed 2024-2025 FAFSA to ensure that all new features were running as intended. This launch occured three months later than its normal release date of October 1^st. 

NEW: It has just been announced that 2025-2026 FAFSA will have a delayed release date, opening by December 1^st, 2024. A possible earlier date will be announced once a testing period has been finalized. 

Students and contributors without a Social Security Number have experienced system widespread setbacks in creating and validating their StudentAid.gov account with the Department of Education, resulting in FAFSAs that have not able to be completed and submitted since opening in December 2023. 

Starting May 2024, the Department enabled changes to their system that allows applicants and contributors without a SSN to immediately access the online 2024-25 FAFSA form after creating a StudentAid.gov account. While identity validation must still occur on all accounts, the FAFSA may now be completed before that takes place. 

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The Department of Education announced that all 2024-2025 FAFSA submissions would not be provided to student's selected colleges until the middle of March as they were continuing to finalize all updates to their FAFSA systems. 

Due to this delay, our Student Financial Aid office could not confirm that your FAFSA had been received until late April - May. Communications were sent to your personal email once we received your FAFSA.

You may check the current status of your FAFSA as determined on your studentaid.gov account by:

1. Logging in to StudentAid.gov with your FSA ID.
2. Navigating to your account Dashboard.
3. Selecting "2024-25 FAFSA Form" from the "My Activity" page. The application status will be one of the following:

Contributor is a new term introduced on the 2024-25 FAFSA. It refers to anyone asked to provide information on a FAFSA including:

• the student
• the student's spouse
• the biological or adoptive parent(s)
• the spouse of a remarried parent who is on the FAFSA (stepparent)

The student's answers on their section of the FAFSA will determine which additional contributors (such as parents or spouse) will be required to provide their information. An invitation will go out to these contributors once the following information is entered on the FAFSA:

• Contributors name
• Date of birth
• Social Security number
• Email address

*For any contibutor who was married and filed jointly on their taxes in 2022 and are no longer married to that spouse, or who have married a different spouse, will be required to self-report their tax information instead of using the Direct Data Exchange (DDX). Consent on the FAFSA must still be provided in this circumstance.

1. Contributor receives an email informing them that they've been identified as a contributor by the student.
2. Contributor creates a FSA account if they don't already have one.
3. Contributor logs in to account using their FSA ID  account username and password.
4. Contributor reviews information about completing their section of the FAFSA form.
5. Contributor provides the required personal and financial information on their own sections of the FAFSA form.

Families may create an FSA ID on the Federal Student Aid website anytime before the starting their FAFSA. This applies to all student, parent, or spouse contributors, with or without a Social Security Number (SSN). 

Yes. Starting in 2024-2025, parents and spouses who are not U.S. Citizens and are without a Social Security Number (SSN) must now create an Federal Student Aid account.

The process of creating an FSA ID for those without a SSN became available starting in January, using the Department of Education's newly developed system to validate identity against credit bureau data. Contributors will provide their Name, Date of Birth, Mailing Address, Email Address; along with validating several follow up questions. If you answer these questions correctly, you’ll be able to use your account immediately to complete the FAFSA.

How To Guide: No SSN FSA ID

No. You can retrieve your existing FSA ID if you forgot your username and password.

An FSA ID created using a Social Security Number (SSN) will take around 1-3 days to be verified and ready to use to complete a FAFSA. We recommend creating it a few days before starting the FAFSA .

An FSA ID created without using a SSN will be immediately verified and is ready to use to complete the FAFSA instantly.

As a result of the Future Act, all contributors are required to have an FSA ID and provide consent in order to:

1. Have their federal tax information (FTI) transferred from the IRS
2. Have their tax data used to determine the student's eligibility for aid
3. Allow the Department of Education to share their tax information with institutions and state higher education agencies for the administration of Title IV aid.

Consent is provided once for the award year and cannot be revoked in that award year. This consent is necessary even if the contributor does not have an SSN, did not file taxes, or filed taxes in another country.

If a required contributor does not provide consent to have their tax information transferred to the FAFSA form, the Student Aid Index (SAI) will not be calculated and the student will not be eligible for federal student aid. 

Note: Being a contributor does not implicate financial responsibility for a student's education.

If any contributor does not provide consent on the FAFSA, the student will not be eligible for any Title IV aid.

Students will be given the opportunity on the FAFSA to indicate they would like to receive a Direct Unsubsidized Loan in these situations. Please be advised that at the Alamo Colleges, students must submit a Direct Unsubsidized Loan request on their ACES account if they are interested in taking out a loan.

Once an electronic FAFSA is started online, all contributors must complete it online. That means that if a electronic signature was left missing, the contributor that needs to sign the application must log in again with their FSA ID.

If a student chooses to complete a paper form, all contributors will need to provide consent, wet (physical) signatures, and mail the application to the Department of Education address listed on the paper application. This method is not recommended due to complexity and increased processing time.

2022 tax information and earnings will be reported on the 2024-2025 FAFSA. Learn more about what documents you will want to have on hand to complete your FAFSA accurately by watching the video below.

Family size reported on the FAFSA will be automatically calculated based on the number of individuals claimed on the tax return (if filed). If your family size on the FAFSA needs to be reported differently than the number claimed on your taxes, there will be an option to correct the number manually after consent has been provided. 

Note: A contributor cannot see what family size was reported from the IRS as that information is protected - be sure to have a copy of your tax return on hand to check who was claimed.

There are a several instances where the application will allow you to self-report if federal tax information cannot be accurately transferred through the Direct Data Exchange (DDX). Examples of when self-reporting is necessary:

• Individuals who were married and filed jointly with the IRS in 2022 and are no longer married to that spouse, or who have married a different spouse
• Individuals with foreign income or who only file foreign tax returns, as the IRS does not link to foreign tax authorities. They will instead need to manually input their income and tax data by converting foreign currency to U.S. dollars and entering the resulting amounts in the comparable fields from U.S. tax returns, such as adjusted gross income, income tax paid, and any untaxed income.
• The contributor is a victim of IRS tax-related identity theft
• The contributor indicates on the online FAFSA that they have not filed a tax return but plan to.

While manually entering tax information into the FAFSA is allowable in these and several other situations, consent must still be provided.

The Data Retrieval Tool (used on the 2023-2024 FAFSA) is an optional tool to transfer your tax information on to the FAFSA, while consent to transfer tax information using the Direct Data Exchange (on the 2024-2025 FAFSA) is required for eligibility. 

The Direct Data Exchange uses an improved process to automatically match a participant with the IRS, meaning a participant will no longer be directed to go on to the IRS website to enter their exact mailing address from their tax return to get a match before data is transferred.

Yes, students and counselors may utilize the Federal Student Aid Estimator to find out how much federal student aid a student may be eligible for starting with the 2024–2025 award year based on an estimated Student Aid Index (SAI).

The Maximum Pell Grant award for the 2024-2025 aid year is unchanged at $7,395. 

The Scheduled Pell Award is the calculated award amount a student can receive during an academic year if they attend full-time (12 hours). Beginning with the 2024-2025 FAFSA, this award is calculated in three ways.

1. Maximum Pell Grant - Automatically calculated when a student has a Student Aid Index (SAI) between –1500 and 0.
2. Student Aid Index (SAI) Calculation - Used for students who don’t automatically qualify for a Maximum Pell Grant, but have a calculated SAI that is less than the Maximum Pell Grant award for the award year. Calculation: The Maximum Pell Grant for the award year minus (-) the student's SAI = the student’s Scheduled Pell award.
3. Minimum Pell Grant - Students whose calculated SAI is greater than the Maximum Pell Grant award for the award year may still be eligible for a Pell Grant based on family size, adjusted gross income, and poverty guidelines.

The new Student Aid Index (SAI) includes several changes in the calculation used to determine aid:

• The number of family members in college is no longer considered in the calculation, but it remains a required question on the form
• Child support received will now count as an asset
• Family farms and small businesses will now count as assets - with the net worth of businesses and farms of any size included
• Families with an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) greater than $60,000 will be required to report asset information

Yes, the 2024-2025 Texas Application For State Financial Aid (TASFA) application was delayed for a few days after the FAFSA release, on January 3^rd, 2024. 

Students may contact our Student Financial Aid office to complete an electronic application or they may submit the paper version found here. 

FAFSA Simplification changes will not result in significant changes to the 2024-2025 TASFA application experience except for the following:

• The methodology used by the federal and state government to measure a families ability to pay for college and their resulting financial aid amount, currently known as the Expected Family Contribution (EFC), has been replaced with the Student Aid Index (SAI).
• To calculate the Student Aid Index (SAI) and better align with the FAFSA, 11 questions have been added and 20 have been removed from the TASFA.

This transition away from using the EFC to using the SAI has not been announced to have any impact on how much state financial aid a TASFA student is eligible to receive at the college they choose to attend.

Questions?

Call the FAFSA Helpline provided by Trellis, a trusted Alamo Colleges District partner, at 1-877-845-9883. This FAFSA Helpline is available Monday - Thursday: 8 am to 6 pm and Friday: 8 am to 5 pm.

If you need further assistance, please contact our Student Financial Aid Office at 210-21ALAMO (210-212-5266).