2024-25 FAFSA Updates
The Student Financial Aid Office is committed to helping you through the 2024-25 FAFSA changes. Schools nationwide have encountered numerous issues with the redesigned FAFSA, and we are working quickly to resolve them. We want to ensure financial aid offers to students are made on the basis of accurate FAFSA information, and that we keep our students entirely up to date on what to expect. Please continue to monitor this webpage for more updates.
We are committed to keeping our students informed of concerns reported by the Department of Education, supporting vendor partners across the country, other school aid offices, and our own financial aid team.
Approximately 20% of FAFSA filers across the country had inaccurate tax data retrieved from the IRS. The Department of Education has updated its timeline to make a list of these impacted applications available to schools by April 5th. Each school’s affected percentage will be slightly different.
Regent University received its list of impacted applications and has already begun working to isolate the impacted FAFSA applications. We have confirmed approximately 27% of our FAFSA filers were impacted by incorrect tax data in their FAFSA applications. The Department of Education expects to send corrected FAFSA files to schools by mid-April for the applications that are impacted by the issue.
For those FAFSA filers who are not impacted, we will continue forward in the awarding process over the coming weeks.
This issue was last updated on April 8, 2024.
The student aid index (SAI) is a calculation performed on the FAFSA that is then sent to colleges to use as the basis for establishing eligibility for need based financial aid. Some FAFSA files, which are fully complete, do not have the needed calculation performed. The Department of Education is working to resolve this.
This issue was last updated on April 4, 2024.
The Department of Education has identified an outstanding issue that has caused incomplete Pell Grant history information to be included on the FAFSA. Students who have received the equivalent of four and a half full years of Pell Grant funding or more are being reviewed through alternative processes while the Department of Education works to resolve the issue.
This issue was last updated on April 4, 2024.
We have identified an issue within the Verification System that has caused a financial aid requirement for the submission of a signed copy of the student’s social security card to generate erroneously. This is caused by the redesign of the back end of the 2024-25 FAFSA, which was released late to vendors by the Department of Education. We are working quickly with our vendor to resolve this.
This issue is fully resolved for all impacted students.
This issue was last updated on April 22, 2024.
The Department of Education is now allowing students to correct their 2024-25 FAFSA forms this week (April 15th – April 19th). If you choose to make a correction to your FAFSA form, please go to StudentAid.gov to complete those updates. To date, as many as 16% of FAFSA applications require a student correction. In addition, this would be the time to add the Regent’s school code to the FAFSA form if it isn’t already.
On April 16, 2024, some FAFSA records were inadvertently replicated and sent to schools multiple times. In response, the Department of Education temporarily ceased sending FAFSA records to schools while it researched and resolved the issue. On April 17, 2024, the Department of Education notified schools that a resolution was implemented and that schools would once again receive FAFSA records.
Approximately 30% of FAFSA forms are potentially affected by known processing or data errors. In the coming days, the Department of Education will provide data to assist schools in identifying the records for which the reprocessing is needed.
This was last updated on April 17, 2024.
Yes. We encourage students to move forward with filing their 2024-25 FAFSA as soon as possible. While the Department of Education (ED), in tandem with institutions, is continuing to resolve unforeseen issues with the redesigned FAFSA, filing now (instead of waiting) is not expected to be a detriment. ED is working to fix issues on currently filed FAFSA files as quickly as possible.
We are receiving newly-filed FAFSA files daily. In some cases, the federal FAFSA processing system may take longer to release a student’s filed FAFSA to us if there are issues with it that they must resolve first. For most filers, the FAFSA will arrive at Regent within 4-7 business days.
Once Regent receives a copy of your submitted FAFSA, our financial aid office will review it and alert you by email if there are financial aid requirements for you to complete before eligibility for federal financial aid can be established. Students should not expect to immediately be prompted to complete follow-up financial aid requirements.
Most FAFSA filing students should expect to receive notification by the end of April for any financial aid requirements that need to be completed. In some cases, our financial aid team has identified financial aid requirements associated with a student’s FAFSA that should not exist. In these cases, we are working to resolve them internally without action needed from the student.
We expect to begin sending initial award offers to students before the end of April. We are working toward a tiered federal awarding approach to provide accurate financial aid offers to students with FAFSA files not associated with known FAFSA issues that could impact the accuracy of award offers.
The Department of Education has fully redesigned the FAFSA for the 2024-25 academic year. The new FAFSA is positioned to substantially modernize and simplify the aid application experience for students for years to come. However, delays in the redesign process have caused a slower than normal application process for students, families, and aid offices.
If you would like to understand more about the changes to the FAFSA you can review an overview provided by the Department of Education here.
