MOCAN – Missouri College & Career Attainment Network

Increasing equity in college and career for Missouri students

College Access

10 Things to Know About the 2024-2025 FAFSA

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The 2024-2025 FAFSA will bring big changes that will impact your seniors and their families as they begin the application this fall. Here’s what you need to know as you’re planning for the upcoming school year:

  1. The 2024-2025 FAFSA form will be available December 2023. The significant changes to the form have delayed its opening from the usual October 1. No specific date has been announced yet. In future years, the form open date will return to October 1.
  2. The Federal Student Aid (FSA) ID will be more important than ever. Students and parents are highly encouraged to create an FSA before beginning the form (including parents without a social security number). FSA IDs can no longer be created and used on the same day.
  3. Questions are different. There have been questions removed, added, and reordered. The questions on the 24-25 form are more aligned with the federal income tax form.
  4. The Parent included on the form could be different. For dependent students with separated parents, the parent who provides the most financial support must be included on the upcoming FAFSA form. In previous years, the form required that the custodial parent’s information was included. In most cases this will be the same parent but could differ for others.
  5. There are significant terminology changes. All of us will be challenged with changing the terminology we have used when referring to the FAFSA. Our colleagues at NCAN have compiled all the New Jargon we must all learn to use.
  6. Direct Data Exchange (DDX) will replace IRS Data Retrieval Tool. The IRS Data Retrieval Tool is being retired and replaced by Direct Data Exchange. With DDX, IRS will share federal tax information with the Department of Education and colleges listed on the FAFSA. Every contributor on the form is required to consent to DDX or the student will not be eligible for federal financial aid.
  7. Student Aid Index (SAI) will replace Expected Family Contribution (EFC). The Student Aid Index (SAI) will be used to determine eligibility for financial aid. The SAI can be as low as -1,500. The switch in the formula is expected to increase the number of students eligible for the Pell Grant.
  8. Financial aid eligibility could decrease with SAI formula. While it is expected that there will be an increase in the number of students eligible for the Pell Grant, there will be some students who see a decrease in financial aid eligibility. This likely due to the SAI formula not including siblings in college and requires the net worth of all businesses and farms, regardless of size. More to come about net worth!
  9. Fall preparation is key! Fall is a great time to prepare students and parents for what’s to come. Host FSA ID Creation Events and make them aware of the information required for the FAFSA. Missouri’s priority deadline for state aid is February 1st with a tentative filing deadline of April 1.
  10. Support will be available. MOCAN and its partners are offering in-person and virtual workshops this fall and spring. All Fall events are currently posted on our Events Page. NCAN, uAspire, and Federal Student Aid will all have resources available for professionals as well as students and their families.

Students Are Taking Their Next Steps; Do You Know Where They’re Headed?

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Bill DeBaun, National College Attainment Network

There are few more poignant moments than when students cross the stage and receive their high school diplomas. At that moment, families, district and school administrators, teachers, and everyone else who has helped the student get to this point see so much of their time and effort realized.

Borrowing a page from every commencement speech ever written, that K-12 culmination is also a new beginning and, for many, a new pathway toward college and/or career.

As students take their first steps toward that new pathway, do district and school personnel really know where their students are going? Unfortunately, the answer too often is “no” or “not really.”

Sure, most schools monitor acceptances and conduct senior exit surveys to better understand students’ post-high school plans, but that knowledge is too infrequently paired with practice that ensures students fulfill those plans.

NCAN often writes about summer melt (and publishes resources about the same). Summer melt is a phenomenon that affects 10-40% of high school students intending to matriculate to a postsecondary institution. We offer suggestions like making sure to measure summer melt, creating college transition checklists, building a summer melt program, and using our summer melt toolkit to be proactive.

One key practice left unconsidered was how to forge stronger connections between K-12 districts and school and the postsecondary institutions to which their students matriculate. When we talk about the “silos” between the K-12 and higher education sectors, what that looks like in practice is that districts and institutions don’t have consistent, meaningful, or productive contact that could benefit students. Existing connections might include scheduling tours for students to visit a campus or getting more posters for the counselors’ suite, but K-12 and higher ed need outreach to build deeper, sustained, less transactional relationships.

Our sense from talking with districts and schools across the country is that substantial proportions of their students matriculate to a handful of institutions, with a long tail of additional institutions getting one or just a few students each year. Our other sense, unfortunately, is that few districts and schools have close professional contact with the institutions welcoming most of their graduates. That lack of contact makes it so there is no formal hand-off of students, and they can fall through the cracks, or “melt” as described above.

Now is the time for school district administrators to look at their senior exit survey data or, even better, their previous National Student Clearinghouse StudentTracker data to see which combination of institutions comprises the largest proportion of students’ destinations. (By the way, summer is the best time to update your StudentTracker Graduates file so that it is ready to go when fall enrollment data become available).

Next, conduct outreach to those institutions, through the admissions or financial aid offices or student support services. See how district and college or university staff can work together to ease students’ transitions. Maybe that is as simple as the university co-creating or developing a college transition checklist (or reviewing an existing one for accuracy and making any needed additions). But maybe it’s a more intensive partnership that includes personalized outreach to students that can answer their matriculation questions. The possibilities are endless, but none of them will come to fruition without there being contact between K-12 and higher ed.

Summer is the right time to do this because both sectors know this is a perilous time of year in a particularly perilous moment for many students, and there is a concrete goal for both sides: making sure students achieve their postsecondary aspirations. Let’s break down the K-12/higher ed silo and forge the connections that can help students in the class of 2023 and beyond.

Addressing Summer Melt Starts in the Spring

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Caroline Doglio, Program Associate

Even though it might feel like summer is far away, for some students summer melt might already be starting. An estimated 10-40% of high school students with the intention to enroll in college never actually do so. This phenomenon disproportionately impacts students of color, first-generation students, and students from low-income backgrounds.

But why aren’t these students actually matriculating? The reality is that showing up to campus is not only a question of whether or not the student wants to go, but also if they have the resources to do so. Unfortunately, students often stumble when faced with complicated forms and processes.

Understanding financial aid is often the biggest barrier for students. It’s estimated that 7.2% of students selected for FAFSA verification do not receive subsidized federal as a result, and we know that verification disproportionately impacts Black and Latino students. These burdens add up, making it more difficult for students to enroll.

The first step to tackling summer melt is understanding how many students it’s impacting and their demographics. A senior exit survey is a great first step to collecting the necessary data. Harvard’s Strategic Data Project Summer Melt Handbook offers resources on increasing completion and what exactly to include in the survey with examples. The guide encourages that questions be specific, like what students’ enrollment plans are and if they have paid their enrollment deposit.

With the senior exit survey providing an estimate of how many students intended to enroll at graduation, data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC)’s StudentTracker for High Schools service can provide a count of how many students actually enrolled.

Though potentially more insightful, identifying groups of students melting at a higher rate than other groups in order to perform targeted outreach. [BD1] Were there specific institutions with higher summer melt rates than others? Is it a race question? An income question? All of the above? Understanding who summer melt is impacting the most is the first step to performing targeted outreach for the years to come.

But how do we help students right now? And how do we make sure they matriculate after they leave the building? Some practitioners are turning to texting. Text Steps was a project piloted by Ascendum Education Group in 2015 and expanded to 13 school districts in Wisconsin between 2018 and 2020. Some key lessons outlined in the brief include:

  • Successful summer melt interventions require the buy-in of both district and school leadership and frontline staff members
  • Student level-data is key for understanding an intervention’s success – but working with data like this involves a learning curve, so prior planning is required
  • Summer melt will start before summer and interventions should take place year-round

The school districts involved measured their impact through NSC data, comparing the postsecondary outcomes between the class of 2018 (control group) and the class of 2019 (who received the text messages). The average fall enrollment across the 13 districts increased by 3 percentage points.

These impacts were felt most by students of color and economically disadvantaged students. In 2018 in participating districts, students of color had a 40% fall in enrollment rate but 65% of students of color participating in Text Steps enrolled in fall 2019. Economically disadvantaged students participating in Text Steps had a 64% enrollment rate compared to a 37% rate for the class of 2018.

You can learn more about summer melt with NCAN’s toolkit and K-12 calendar.  Have questions about summer melt? We’d love to hear from you! Contact Caroline Doglio ([email protected]) to hear more about approaches to freezing summer melt.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Learn from Other Schools’ Success Stories

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Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, NCAN

Before I jump into the rest of this awesome blog post, I’d love for you to save the dates for April 17-21. During this week, NCAN will host at least a webinar a day organized around the idea that everyone in a school has a role to play in students’ college and career readiness. Students’ postsecondary pathways aren’t just a school counselor’s focus, or a teacher’s focus, or a principal’s focus. No, every caring adult in a school, along with external partners, parents, and students themselves has a role to play.

Our great webinar lineup will examine topics like helping students reach different kinds of college and career pathways, how to build a college and career readiness team, and what kinds of frameworks are useful for understanding what students should know and experience. Interest piqued? We hope so. Full details are coming soon, but giving us your name and email here will make sure we get you more information and an invite ASAP!

Onto this post’s main business. Lots of districts and schools really want to improve their college and career readiness efforts. You may even be associated with one of them! But it turns out lots of districts and schools can also benefit from help figuring out how to do that. Don’t reinvent the wheel! It feels bad. Instead, borrow someone else’s wheel and make it yours!

I’ve pulled some blog post from NCAN’s blog that focus on different aspects of college and career advising. These are mostly from a high school context, but some also feature K-12 and community-based partnerships. Have questions? As always, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at [email protected], and I hope you’ll reach out!

Still with me? I’m grateful, thanks for reading! As a bonus, here’s three more of my favorite posts:

Next month we’ll have more information on how to freeze summer melt early. Summer melt starts way before summer starts, so it’s never too early to start thinking about it. In the meantime, I hope this post got some ideas going on different practices districts and schools can adopt to help students be more successful!

Start Your Year Off Right by Refreshing Your College and Career Toolbox

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Caroline Doglio, Program Associate, National College Attainment Network

As January approaches and you consider your new year’s resolutions, here at NCAN we find it to be a great time to reaffirm your commitment to college and career readiness! If you’re lost on where to start, a great jumping off point is our K-12 resources for postsecondary transitions. This page serves as a compilation of resources, some created by NCAN and others not, to help navigate every step of a student’s transition into the postsecondary world. 

Depending on what you and your district might want to tackle first, there are numerous tools linked on the page. If you’re curious on where your district or school can improve its work around postsecondary advising, OneGoal has rubrics that measures advising on seven different focus areas. Once a district goes through the rubric, identifying places they might want to concentrate on, NCAN’s K-12 calendar can be a great resource to accomplish certain shifts. The calendar is color-coded by topic, such as partnerships, FAFSA, data, summer melt, etc., making it easy to focus on topics that the rubric identifies.

Another option for tools to focus on could be data! Understanding where students are not only going, but persisting and completing, after high school is key to improving postsecondary outcomes. The National Student Clearinghouse’s StudentTracker for High Schools is an easy, affordable way to start understanding student-level outcomes and identifying patterns. Once you become more comfortable with the tool, NCAN has some resources on how to level up the work you do with it.

The final tool linked on the page is an NCAN brief that examines five school districts and partner organizations using big ideas to improve their students’ postsecondary outcomes and how other districts could replicate these practices to achieve similar outcomes.

On top of these tools, there are additional pages linking to plenty of resources on various topics. There’s a page on transforming postsecondary advising, which allows you to explore strategies for connecting students and families to information they need. Another page provides more information on how to use data to educate students and inform services. There’s a FAFSA specific page to learn about best practices that have worked across the country. And finally, a whole page on strategies for reducing summer melt, which, by the way, starts way before summer.

The new year provides a chance to re-orient yourself and your goals and what is a better goal than easing postsecondary transitions!

Have questions or looking for a specific resource not covered by the above? I’d love to hear from you! You can reach me at [email protected]!

As The Year Winds Down, Use NSC Data to Plan Next Steps

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Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives

NSC

The National Student Clearinghouse recently announced that its “effective date” for the fall 2022 semester was November 18. This means that StudentTracker for High Schools subscribers will have new postsecondary outcomes data for their students in the next few weeks. That data is invaluable for understanding students’ postsecondary pathways and shaping postsecondary advising strategy.

If the words in the paragraph above seem foreign to you, let’s stop and rewind in the paragraph below. Did you catch all the above? Skip over the next paragraph or read it for a refresher.

The National Student Clearinghouse is a nonprofit organization that warehouses data covering about 98% of all the postsecondary enrollments nationally in any given year. They offer a subscription service to K-12 districts and schools ($595 per high school per year) that matches high schools’ senior classes with their postsecondary enrollment and completion data. Three times a year, the NSC sets “effective dates” where they have enough high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment data to generate new sets of reports. These reports are a collection of charts and spreadsheets that have both aggregated and student-level data. (Incidentally, education nonprofits who work with students can also access this data through a different subscription service, either Student Tracker for Outreach or Student Tracker for Educational Organizations.)

In the next few weeks, Student Tracker subscribers will receive an email when their reports are available for them to download from their FTP accounts. Once that notification goes out, it’s important to take a look and share with any internal personnel or external partners who collaborate with you on college and career readiness activities. Not sure where to start? Here are four things to look for in the data:

  1. Class of 2022 first fall enrollment: This is the fall 2022 semester effective date, so naturally most users will be interested in how their most recent graduating class fared. The class of 2021 experienced substantial first fall enrollment declines compared to class of 2020, so all eyes will be on the class of 2022 and whether these students will continue the enrollment declines.
  2. Previous classes’ persistence patterns: We know that the past few years haven’t just been disruptive for the classes of 2021 and 2022, they’ve been disruptive for, well, pretty much all of us. Using the stacked bar charts showing year-by-year outcomes in the aggregate report, it would be interesting to take a look and see if students from previous classes had an uptick in stopping out or if they were able to persist in and/or complete a postsecondary pathway.
  3. Top 25 institutions: The Student Tracker report comes with a .csv file showing the top 25 institutions to which students matriculated. Many districts and schools have fairly set matriculation patterns, but it’s always good to look for surprises here. The next level of analysis is to use the “student detail file” to break out students’ outcomes by institution. Are the institutions to which students are matriculating delivering good outcomes? If not, it might be time to consider a conversation with the institution, a change in college advising, or both.
  4. Outcomes by student demographics: When submitting a “graduates file” with the names and birth dates of students from each graduating class, the NSC offers the option to include students’ demographic characteristics. When provided, the NSC then sends back a report disaggregating outcomes by those characteristics. This is important because all student groups may not be getting the same outcomes as a graduating class is overall. Having this data available highlights gaps that can be addressed through practice and programming. Not submitting student demographics? Include them in your next graduate file upload, and you’ll see these charts in the next release.

Interested in the above but not a Student Tracker subscriber? It’s not too late to sign up. Once subscribed, you’ll be sent a report based on the November 18 effective date and then two more reports (mid-April, mid-August) in the next calendar year.

The effective use of data can help us improve students’ outcomes. The NSC’s Student Tracker service is a handy tool to in the toolkit for examining students’ actual postsecondary pathways.