FAFSA applications dip in Iowa amid COVID-19, reversing gains

When the coronavirus pandemic shuttered schools last spring, a key factor in getting high school seniors to college, Free Application for Federal Student Aid filings, flatlined.

Though FAFSAs had been rising in Iowa, the pandemic’s onset halted that progress, and in the year since reversed some of the gains.

As of Thursday, about 48 percent of Iowa’s spring high school graduates had filed a FAFSA, down 4 percentage points from the previous year’s 52 percent through the same period, according to a FAFSA tracker produced by Iowa College Aid, the state’s student financial aid agency for nearly 60 years.

A national FAFSA-filing tracker, which uses slightly different figures, shows about 49 percent of Iowa seniors completed a FAFSA through May 7, down about 5 percent from the previous year — and slightly better than the national decline of 5.6 percent, ranking Iowa 21st in the country.

“Iowa has been really promoting FAFSA completion, and the efforts we're showing, we were on an upward trend,” Iowa College Aid spokeswoman Elizabeth Keest Sedrel told The Gazette.

“The pandemic, just like it changed everything, changed that trajectory. We saw a drop.

“So now the goal is to offset the losses during the pandemic and get us back on that upward trend line where we’re increasing FAFSA completion in Iowa again,” she said. “We were doing it, and we know we can get there again.”

With COVID-19 creating confusion everywhere around the college experience, student finances and health care needs, Iowa is not alone in its FAFSA losses.

Only four states so far this FAFSA filing season have seen increases — Illinois, Wyoming and the Dakotas. The rest are reporting drops — some big — Oklahoma and New Mexico both report 37 percent filing rates and 13 percent declines; and Alaska, with a 26 percent filing rate, down 9 percent.

These numbers matter because FAFSA filing historically has proved — both locally and nationally — to be a critical step in the college-going process and a key indicator of who eventually will enroll. It’s especially important for low-income collegiate prospects — a growing population across Iowa high schools — as the FAFSA is required for all federal student aid, such as Pell Grants and federal loans.

Not only that, FAFSAs are required for a lot of state and institutional aid — serving as the application for the Iowa Tuition Grant, meant for students enrolling in private colleges or universities, and the Iowa Last-Dollar Scholarship, meant for those pursuing high-demand jobs in Iowa.

The Last-Dollar Scholarship specifically speaks to Gov. Kim Reynolds’ 2018 goal of getting at least 70 percent of Iowans in the workforce some post-high school education or training by 2025.

Reynolds set that goal based on a 2015 study from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce that found 68 percent of Iowans ages 25 to 64 will need such credentials in a decade.

As the price of higher education continues to rise — with more tuition hikes looming — Iowa College Aid set its sights on the FAFSA as a way not only to make higher education more affordable and accessible, but to get those who might never have thought about college to start including it in their post-graduation plan.

‘What’s next year going to look like?’

For the vast majority of people, going to college is a process, Iowa College Aid Executive Director Mark Wiederspan said during a March 30 “In-Depth Week” discussion on higher education, as part of The Gazette’s Iowa Ideas initiative.

“Students and the vast majority of people just don't wake up one day and say, ‘I'm going to go to college,’” he said. “You think about, what is it like to live on a college campus? What are the prices? What kind of college do I want to go to? And then you go into the search phase and search out those colleges that meet your criteria.”

For many students in Iowa’s more rural regions, “the idea of going to college is just not on their mind,” he said. Getting them to start thinking about higher education through FAFSA education was making inroads until the pandemic arrived — keeping students out of high school counseling offices, worrying about family finances, wary of what college would even look like and wanting to stay closer to home.

“When you add COVID into this mix, it sort of compounds that predisposition and that thought process of whether or not you're going to go to college,” Wiederspan said.

“That makes the decision a little bit more difficult, especially when you consider, well what's next year going to look like?”

Filings flounder

Iowa College Aid noticed an immediate hit to their FAFSA efforts in March 2020, when a strong filing season stalled amid coronavirus concerns. Numbers on pace to exceed the previous year stayed well above rates from the 2017-18 season — after a big jump in the 2018-19 term. But the 2020-21 FAFSA cycle suddenly deviated from past cycles after schools statewide shuttered due to COVID-19 on March 16.

“Once schools closed, FAFSA filing flattened, falling below previous years,” according to a 2020 Iowa FAFSA report, highlighting its 51 percent filing rate as of May 31, 2020, was down a percentage point from the year before.

This cycle’s filings are down even more — numbers were worse in October and November, which typically see a rush on FAFSAs. Nationwide, filings were more than 15 percent below the previous year in late October through early December 2020.

The outlook improved in early spring this year — as colleges across Iowa and the nation began announcing fall will look much more like the traditional college experience.

In late March, Wiederspan said, Iowa saw “a substantial increase in the number of FAFSAs completed,” and noted that was “somewhat unheard of.”

‘Getting more students to file’

Looking forward, Iowa College Aid and its partners are going to continue their push for students to file the free federal aid application — which was been made easier recently with a law simplifying the process and cutting down the questions by two-thirds.

There’s also been talk of making the FAFSA mandatory or having it be part of the required financial literacy curriculum.

“That’s just part of the discussion,” Iowa College Aid’s Sedrel said. “The point of getting more students to file the FAFSA is to make sure that they understand how much help might be available for them to continue their education.”

And she’s not lost hope for a FAFSA rebound still this cycle — which wraps June 30.

“It would not surprise me if we saw more FAFSAs filed late in the cycle,” she said.

So far, though, just one school in the Linn and Johnson county area — George Washington High — is reporting an uptick in FAFSA filings, with a 6 percent bump, to 49 percent. The rest all showed losses — including a 19 percent decrease at John F. Kennedy High and a 12 percent drop at Linn-Mar.

That has exacerbated the Iowa college admissions guessing game this year — considering the FAFSA predictor no longer is as helpful and standardized tests, historically eyed as an enrollment indicator, also were thrown into chaos amid COVID-19.

University of Iowa Vice President for Enrollment Management Brent Gage in March told The Gazette he typically has a team of data scientists working with complex predictive models capable of projecting — to a relatively accurate degree — upcoming fall enrollment.

“In talking to my colleagues around the country, all of that has been wiped away,” he said. “Bottom line for us … the game is going to go late into the fourth quarter.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com