This Electronic Announcement provides an update to the Department’s implementation of student-initiated corrections, its plans to reprocess records impacted by FAFSA Processing System (FPS) issues outlined in the April 9 Electronic Announcement (GENERAL-24-37), and the launch of the Department’s week-long #FAFSAFastBreak outreach campaign.
Student corrections are now broadly available for applicants and their contributors. Last week, the Department made student-initiated corrections available for brief periods while we completed testing. Since then, the Department has successfully processed more than 100,000 corrections. Students who need to make corrections or who choose to make additions or changes to their FAFSA forms should return to StudentAid.gov to complete those updates. Schools and states should typically receive a new ISIR transaction, and students should typically be able to review their updated FAFSA Submission Summary within 1 to 3 days of the applicant’s submission of a correction. As is its standard practice, the Department will keep the Issue Alerts page up to date as we identify and resolve issues.
In the coming days, the Department will be emailing all applicants and their contributors who have processed applications in an “Action Required” status. Emails will be sent to all applicants who require the most common corrections such as missing signatures or consent and approval to access federal tax data, students who indicated they were only interested in unsubsidized loans, and applicants who have started, but not completed their FAFSA form submission. For most applicants and contributors, this process should only take a few minutes.
As previously announced, this week the Department expects to reprocess the approximately 10% of records impacted by FAFSA Processing System (FPS) known issues. The reprocessing of these records will begin early this week in small batches.
Additional information on the reprocessing codes provided on the reprocessed ISIRs will be provided in an upcoming electronic announcement. As a reminder, impacted records can be identified in the institution and state-specific files delivered to SAIG mailboxes by the following codes with detailed descriptions provided in the Technical FAQ and Known Issues guide.
FAFSA Processing System (FPS) IDs (1 = affected, blank = unaffected)
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FPS_PellFlag_01 Pell Grant Eligibility flag is incorrectly blank
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FPS_PellFlag_02 Pell Grant Eligibility Flag incorrectly set to Y on ISIRs without an SAI
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FPS_NSLDS_01 Comment code 217 sometimes appears incorrectly
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FPS_SCA_01 Dependent students with assets and blank SCA
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FPS_BlankSAI_01 SAI is blank on some ISIRs that do not contain reject codes
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FPS_BlankSAI_02 Federal tax information (FTI) is missing from some non-rejected ISIRs where FTI consent has been provided.
As previously described in the April 9 Electronic Announcement (GENERAL-24-37), we are targeting to reprocess the approximately 20% of records affected by inconsistent data from the Federal Tax Information Direct Data Exchange (FTI-DDX) on or around May 1.
Today we are launching the Department’s FAFSA Week of Action (April 15-19) and announcing the start of our #FAFSAFastBreak campaign, a national effort to drive FAFSA submissions among high school seniors and returning college students, building on the ongoing work of the Department and many others across the country to increase FAFSA submissions. This Week of Action will build upon previous and ongoing efforts to engage school leaders and community-based organizations across the country to drive FAFSA submissions among high school seniors and returning college students. We have received nearly 200 commitments from high school counselors, principals, superintendents, after-school programs, parent groups, non-profit organizations, and other local and state education organizations that have pledged to share information, and host virtual or in-person events, among other commitments. For many, these commitments build on previous efforts and will continue in the months ahead. During this Week of Action, there will be at least 85 in-person events across the country ranging from FAFSA clinics to spirit weeks in local high schools to drive FAFSA submissions.
To learn more about high school senior FAFSA submission rates in your state, see weekly rankings here, and submission data by district or high school here. Please be sure to use the hashtag #FAFSAFastBreak when sharing about your FAFSA submission efforts in the weeks ahead so we can uplift your critical efforts to drive FAFSA submissions nationwide during the Week of Action and beyond.