Beginning with the 2017 academic year, college students will have a much easier time filing for the FAFSA, or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. According to Cory Turner of National Public Radio (NPR), the federal government will release the application three months earlier to students in October to expedite and mitigate the college process.

Turner said in his article, “usually, students start applying to colleges in the fall, then apply for financial aid in January – when the FAFSA comes out …The new plan would release the FAFSA in October instead of January.”

Under this new change to the FAFSA, families will be allowed to submit their “prior-prior” tax returns, as NPR refers to it. For instance, for the 2017-18 school year students can submit their 2015 income information rather than their 2016 information, according to studentaid.ed.gov.

By allowing families to submit tax information from two years ago, they no longer have to rush to retrieve data from the IRS to submit to FAFSA. Fordham’s Associate Vice President of Student Financial Services, Angela Van Dekker, believes this change will simplify the process of applying for financial aid.

In addition, students will be able to use an IRS data-retrieval tool to help them fill in most of the information on the FAFSA. According to Van Dekker, students will not have to estimate income information anymore, which should make their applications less susceptible to the long process of verification.

“It should be a lot more accurate,” Van Dekker stated about the financial aid process under the new system. She noted the time needed to ensure the information is correct will be reduced because data will be more consistent, which will, in turn, somewhat expedite the process.

The financial aid office should be able to move faster with processing applications if it does not have to constantly reach out to students for clarifications regarding their information. However, Van Dekker noted that she does not believe the office will be able to generate estimated packages to students much earlier than it does now, which follows a student’s acceptance to Fordham in May.

There may be some issues that the federal government will have to address before the new system can work. Van Dekker noted that some financial aid representatives are concerned about how all these new factors will settle into place. “We have to do a lot of planning,” she said.

Parental income usually rises slightly from year to year, in which case students will benefit from filing information when income was a bit lower and becoming eligible for more financial aid.

She mentioned that there will need to be upgrades in the software her office uses to generate financial aid packages to ensure that her team will be able to get the job done efficiently under the new system. The federal government will need to generate the Pell Grant schedule earlier to ensure that all students who are qualified will see their eligibility reflected in their packages.

Ultimately, there are many factors that still need to come together before the new process can occur.

In addition, there may be an issue in regards to financial aid packages by allowing families to submit tax information two years prior to the school year. “Some students are going to benefit from this and some students are going to have an issue,” Van Dekker stated.

Parental income usually rises slightly from year to year, in which case students will benefit from filing information when income was a bit lower and becoming eligible for more financial aid.

If there is an issue such as a drastically lower parental income from one year to another, the family may present the case to the financial aid office. This process of presenting a case can take some time depending on when the student files the case. For instance, if a student files the case in April, when the financial aid office is busiest, he or she will have to wait a while before any results are seen.

Before the financial aid team can make professional judgements in extreme cases of income change, they will need to collect information such as IRS data and employer documentation. Overall, the process can take several weeks.

Ultimately, this new method of applying for financial aid is aimed to make the process easier and faster for college students and financial aid offices. “I think that anything that benefits the students in the long run benefits certainly the people in my office … anything that helps the student helps the University as a whole,” Van Dekker said.