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Have you declared your E — Enroll, Employ, or Enlist? That’s the question that hundreds of financial aid leaders were presented with at the third annual Financial Aid Summit in June held over two days in Winston-Salem. The three E’s is an approach schools have used to ensure more students have a plan for after high school, one of the main themes of the summit.
Whether that plan leads to enrolling in an institution of higher education, immediately pursuing employment, or enlisting in the military, summit speakers said financial aid is a helpful and often necessary tool for students to achieve their goals after high school.
“Financial aid is a team sport,” said Melany Reeves Clark, the director of communications and marketing for myFutureNC.
Speakers at the summit provided leaders with the latest information to understand the upcoming changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), one of the most critical and common routes for postsecondary financial aid.
Attendees also discussed strategies to increase the number of students pursuing a postsecondary degree or industry-valued credential through FAFSA completion. They shared best practices and engaged in activities to help inform and develop an action plan for the next school year and beyond.
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Why does FAFSA matter?
The FAFSA form determines student eligibility for federal financial aid. The application is needed in order for students to know if they qualify for federal grants, work-study funds, and loans.
The FAFSA is free to complete and provides students with access to a potentially large source of financial aid to support paying for their higher education. Many states also use the FAFSA to determine student eligibility for state and school aid.
“For many families financial aid is a game changer in the way that it allows students who normally would not have the opportunity to attend college, it helps them pay for college and also realize their dream,” said Monty Hickman, the associate director of student success support services at the North Carolina Community Colleges System.
What’s new with the FAFSA this year? There are several updates coming to this year’s FAFSA form and process.
First, it is expected that the FAFSA will open Oct. 1, 2025. Same day FSA (Federal Student Aid) ID set up and FAFSA completion will also be available. There will be a simplified contributor process, according to Kathy Hastings, the director of outreach and communications at the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority (NCSEAA). The student just needs to know and input the contributor’s email address and then that contributor will receive a code for verification.
The House and Senate budgets at the federal level are currently going through reconciliation. Some items in those budgets that may impact student financial aid include:
- Changes to student financial aid eligibility.
- Establishment of workforce Pell grants.
- $10.5 billion to address the 2025 Pell grant program shortfall.
- Policies that would mean students can’t receive Pell grants if they’re enrolled in school less than half time and an increase in the needed number of credits taken per year from 24 to 30.
- The Family Farm and Small Business Exemption Act aims to change FAFSA rules that count farm and small business assets and restore their exemption from being counted as part of a family’s net worth.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) also announced it will launch new identity validation processes in the fall to combat student aid fraud.
“In the interim, the Department will require institutions of higher education to validate the identity of certain first-time applicants who are enrolled in the summer term,” the DOE press release said.
In addition to implementing fraud detection efforts, the DOE said it will also make changes to acceptable documentation for identity validation.
“Notably, an applicant must present, either in person or on a live video conference, an unexpired, valid, government-issued photo identification to an institutionally authorized individual and the institution must preserve a copy of this documentation,” the release said.
You can find more guidance on these new processes here.
FAFSA data walk
The summit featured a FAFSA data walk, which has been used at several FAFSA-related events in North Carolina. Designed with community engagement in mind, the walk encouraged participants to discuss the implications of the data and potential changes they would like to see.
It’s estimated that the FAFSA completion rate for North Carolina is 51% for the 2024-25 school year. The national average is 55%, according to data displayed at the FAFSA data walk at the event. By 2030, myFutureNC has set the FAFSA completion goal of 80% for North Carolina high school seniors.
The new 2024-25 FAFSA form had multiple glitches and delays, which caused stress for students and families seeking help paying for college. This could have been a contributing factor to a lower completion rate for the 2024-25 school year compared to the previous school year, which had a completion rate of 55.3%.
“It’s one thing to have somebody tell you a piece of data or tell you a story, but it’s another thing to actually engage with it,” Hastings said. “It allows folks to begin to own what they’re seeing and what they might want to change about the data.”
At the end of the walk, data walk participants were able to scan a QR code and cast their vote for what they would like the state’s new FAFSA completion goal to be. Those results will be combined with votes from previous events and used to inform the new FAFSA completion goal.
“I think some folks get intimidated by numbers, so this is a way to hopefully try to make it a little bit more accessible, so that they feel some ownership in it,” Hastings said. “I hope, through the exercise, it might inspire schools and districts to set their own goals.”
One county had a significantly higher completion rate than the state’s overall rate. Columbus County Schools had a completion rate of 84.1%, up 17.7% from the previous year. Here’s how they did it.
Lessons from Columbus County Schools
Columbus County Schools is first in the state out of 115 districts for FAFSA completion, with its completion rate of 84.1%. This is the district’s second year in a row of achieving first place. For the 2023-24 school year, Columbus County Schools had a 73.7% FAFSA completion rate, which was 13.9% higher than the previous year.
In a span of two school years, the district went from a 59.8% FAFSA completion rate to a 84.1% completion rate. That’s a lot of growth in a relatively short period of time.
There are multiple factors that impacted the completion rate growth. However, one factor that cannot be overlooked is the leadership of Laura Hunter, Columbus County Schools’ director of curriculum and instruction.
Hunter joined Columbus County Schools in the summer before the 2023-24 school year. While increasing the FAFSA completion rate wasn’t the main objective of her job, she saw an opportunity that she couldn’t ignore.
“I’m one of those true believer people that just genuinely knows that to disrupt cycles of generational poverty, you have to disrupt the system,” Hunter said.
Hunter and her team took the multipronged approach of using communication, relationships, and direct outreach as strategies to improve the district’s FAFSA completion rate. During the 2023-24 school year, Hunter started sending a weekly email to the high school principals in the district with ongoing data updates toward their goal. Initially, that goal was to meet or surpass the state average and their neighboring districts.
“I started tracking the counties that touch us, and I was competitive, trying to also build some competition for my principals to get them more engaged in the process,” Hunter said.
Once they reached their goal of surpassing the state average, they made a big push to get to first place in the 2023-24 school year, which they ended up achieving. Fueled by reaching their goals, Hunter knew they needed a plan going into the 2024-25 school year.
With a big goal ahead of them, the district ended up hiring a student success coordinator that helped with all things FAFSA related and more. The coordinator took advantage of the strong network of relationships in the community and direct outreach as her main methods of increasing the completion rate. This set the district up for success, with many of their students prepped to complete the new FAFSA before the updated form was even available.
“We hit the ground running with a game plan this year, which involved making sure that everybody had their CFNC (College for North Carolina) login, which is an issue unto itself, and making sure that everybody had completed all of their front-end FAFSA stuff before it launched,” Hunter said.
Once the form launched, many students completed it, and that left the remaining students as a top priority for the district. Then, the coordinator reached out to each student one by one and helped them complete the form. This approach allowed the district to work with their strengths to create collective momentum to reach their goal, all with the underlying hope of building a more inclusive process.
“I believe that our systems should be more inclusive and less exclusive, and changing that is a real mission for me, most especially in rural America,” Hunter said.
You can find updates and more resources about FAFSA on the DOE’s website.
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