#FastTracktoFAFSA
In August 2023, high school seniors began submitting their college applications and college students made their way to campuses nationwide. The Better FAFSA promised to streamline and improve the traditional financial aid process, but a delayed launch, coupled with ongoing technical glitches and processing issues, created huge hurdles for hundreds of thousands of students across the country in determining and accessing financial resources for college. The challenges have been felt most deeply and directly by first-generation students, students of color, and students from underserved and low-income backgrounds—those who stand to benefit the most from student aid.
As of September, the completion rates for the class of 2028 were still down 9.1% as compared with previous years. (NCAN)
It Takes a Village…And An Alliance
As institutions strained to resolve and mitigate issues with the form, countless nonprofit organizations, foundations, and counselors—including more than a dozen member organizations of our Alliance community—stepped in to provide hands-on support to students completing the FAFSA.
The National College Attainment Network (NCAN), Get Schooled, and others launched campaigns to restore students’ confidence in the college process and provide guidance for overcoming technical and logistical obstacles, collectively reaching millions of young people and helping to close the gap in FAFSA completion.
Listening to Students & Following Their Lead
With postsecondary organizations across the Alliance already working around the clock to support students with FAFSA completion, students themselves were also sharing powerful advice and support with each other. So in an effort to add to the incredible body of work that was already underway, we held a series of listening sessions with students, all of whom had gone through the 2023-2024 FAFSA process. In addition to valuable support they had each received from our member organizations including 10,000 Degrees, Beyond12, OneGoal, and PeerForward, we sought to better understand how they had benefited from other available supports. Which resources had been most impactful, and what—if anything—did they still need or wish they would have had when tackling the Better FAFSA for the first time?
Students shared how their experiences:
Had made an already overwhelming process more difficult;
Compounded the stress of other challenges in their day-to-day lives;
Contained ‘glitches’ that even the most tech-savvy person could not possibly fix; and
Spurred an overall confusion with the process that left many students, and their families, panicked as deadlines loomed and delays persisted.
The students we talked to were tenacious, persistent, and savvy. Our most eye-opening learning was that, while students referenced mentors, parents, and peers as being valuable sources of support and encouragement with the FAFSA, it was actually TikTok that turned out to be their unofficial go-to source for “how to” tutorials and “hacks” to overcome technical and logistical hurdles.
Every young person we talked to shared specific examples of how TikTok came to their rescue when wrestling with a particular part of the Better FAFSA, learning how to get around a ‘glitch’, and even how to send out a paper application when the digital process simply wouldn’t suffice.
Young people were successfully finding solutions – and each other – via a world of support at their fingertips. However, the solutions were scattered around the app, and the only accessible way to find them was by searching and sifting through hashtags (using keywords like #FAFSA to discover ‘tagged’ videos). There was no curated place to find these videos by issue or topic, and not a lot of outside attention being paid to the entrepreneurial approach students were taking to educate their peers.
When we asked students what kind of campaign would be most helpful to them, or what resources would be most valuable based on their own experience, many felt inspired to create their own content to reflect on their own experiences and share their hard-earned wisdom to help their peers.
#FastTrackToFAFSA: A Campaign By and For Young People
To design the campaign and develop content, we partnered with a group of young people (ages 17 – 22) who were already working with our member organizations. We sought to create something that would be both inspiring and motivational, without duplicating efforts with other FAFSA and college readiness campaigns that were already underway. By putting youth voice and perspective at the center of our approach and leaning into our Alliance community core values of radical support, candor, and authenticity; our campaign empowers and invites young people to tell their own stories—and centers their voices in a conversation that’s typically dominated by adults.
The #FastTrackToFAFSA campaign harnesses the entrepreneurial energy, digital savvy, and social connectedness of the current generation of high school and college students. Our student-created content is geared toward helping their peers feel confident about completing the FAFSA, addressing common glitches and issues with the form in specific and actionable ways, and earning (or restoring) their faith in the FAFSA process. Many of the videos are a direct response to a particular issue that impacted their own FAFSA experience. And all of them are grounded in the same transparency, candor, and radical support that the students were drawn to and inspired by in others’ videos.
Trinitii Baggett, Junior, Agnes Scott University, Beyond 12 Student – ‘Take a Deep Breath, You Got This’
Trinitii shares her top three tips for peers completing their FAFSA applications, including how to de-stress, get support from your school’s financial aid office, and pace yourself through the application process.
Atta Diop, Senior, Ohio State University, Beyond 12 Student – ‘Tips for First Gen Students and First Gen Americans’
Atta walks students through the challenges she faced in filling out the FAFSA, being the first in her family to go to college and having parents who are not native English speakers. She provides her top three tips and words of encouragement for students who might be in a similar situation, including seeking support from your school’s Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, attending workshops, and completing the application early to have ample time to address any issues.
All videos are curated as re-posts of America’s Promise Alliance’s TikTok, and we created a Social Media Toolkit to enable Alliance member organizations and other stakeholders to share student-created content with their networks.
Deeper Insights
In addition to the topics and themes students touched on in the videos above, a number of themes came up again and again in our conversations about the issues they encountered during the FAFSA application process, and where support is needed the most:
First-Generation Student Applications. What do you do when you and your parents/guardians have never done the FAFSA before?
Non-Citizen/Non-English-Speaking Parents and Students. How do parents/guardians without Social Security #s, get through this step? How can parents/guardians who are not English speakers access translation tools and support?
Students without a Parental Figure in the Household. How do students in foster care or with no parent or guardian complete the required parental information on the form? How can students with parents abroad, or without access to the internet, complete the form?
Setting Up Profiles. What are the best practices for setting up and syncing the required student/ parent profiles?
Tax Information. What info is needed before filling out the FAFSA and what tax info should students/parents/guardians expect to have on hand? Where do they get this info and how can they bypass it if for some reason they don’t have it?
Strategies for Contacting Direct, Human Support. What are some alternatives to receiving tech support when you cannot get in touch with the Department of Education? What tools and avenues for support do young people and their families have available to them?
Clarifying Wording and Terminology used in the FAFSA Application. What are helpful translations and definitions of common words or parts of FAFSA?
Making Edits to Your Submission. How can a student or guardian make edits to submitted FAFSA info, such as adding schools?
Getting your FAFSA to your College/Universities of Choice. How do you make sure your FAFSA gets submitted to your schools on time (dates, deadlines, process)?
Applying for FAFSA When Going to Trade School (other routes to post-secondary careers). What does FAFSA look like when you are not going for a 4-year degree?
Inspiration and Motivation for Not Giving Up. Inspirational stories from students who ‘made it through’ – What is the reward on the other side?
What’s Next
We’re honored to lift up the voices of these inspiring students through the #FastTrackToFAFSA campaign. With the recent announcement that the opening of this year’s FAFSA will again be delayed by two months, we’re hopeful that this campaign can continue to grow and serve more young people as a source of information and inspiration.
Please check out the resources linked below and share:
Original #FastTrackToFAFSA video content on TikTok (see Reposts from @americaspromise)
Social Media Toolkit for Stakeholders