UW-Madison’s Ellie Bruecker was featured in a National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) report concerning a recent decline in FAFSA completion due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bruecker is a doctoral student with the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, and works as a project assistant with the university’s Student Success Through Applied Research Lab.
As high schoolers throughout the nation are schooling from home, completions of the FAFSA have declined significantly, the report explains. Though experts are unsure of how this will compare to previous years or affect fall enrollment, many are becoming concerned.
Bruecker, alongside other experts interviewed, says that this decline will disproportionately affect lower-income students and students from underrepresented backgrounds. She added that data from the next few weeks will be instructive in determining how much the pandemic is impacting FAFSA completion rates.
Some states and colleges have pushed back individual filing deadlines, but Bruecker explains that many higher education institutions and high schools are concerned with more immediate problems stemming from the pandemic, like making sure students are fed and adjusting to distance learning.
In the report, Bruecker also notes a “lack of information and lack of resources in schools that serve a lot of low-income students and students of color.”
“They have fewer school counselors for students and they also have a lot more to deal with beyond just the FAFSA,” says Bruecker. “Where this fits into the priority list for resource-strapped and time-constrained school counselors, I’m not sure.”
Read the full report here.