FAFSA Website 2012-2013 Changes to Apply for Free Grants

This year's changes start right on the home page, with your first name being entered first on the login, and your last name, last.

Visitors to the FAFSA website are presented with all their options on one page. Depending on where you are in the process, you can:

• begin, continue or finish their FAFSA
• check the status, view or print a submitted FAFSA
• correct or review and check your corrections, or print signature pages

After you login, the computerized form lets you know what you should be doing, rather than asking you what you want to do.

FAFSA Pin Changes

• Social security numbers will no longer be displayed on the confirmation page after you put them in. (They're still required, though.) Instead, you will see a long PIN reference number which is the month, day, year, hour, minute, and second that the page was created. (No, you don't have to memorize it.)
• A virtual keyboard will be displayed where you enter your birth date and SSN#. Instead of typing them in, you will use your mouse.

These measures will make it harder for someone to use this information to login and access another person's FAFSA application.

EFC Calculator Changes

Of course, if you actually provide your personal information, you can save time on your FAFSA application by getting a PIN through the FAFSA4caster and importing your financial data, also.

Other changes allow you to get an estimate of how much federal college financial aid you can get. Because this depends not only on your FAFSA EFC but also on your college costs, you have a choice about what figure to enter for your COA (cost of attendance) by:

1. using the national average (based on what type of school, housing, residency, program length)

or
2. entering your own estimated cost

You can also compare side-by-side, two financial aid estimates for different schools.

FAFSA Online Application Changes

- additional security:

• a virtual keyboard
• SSN's are masked and replaced by a different identifying code

- legislative changes:

• Cooperative Education Program (co-op) earnings are now excluded from income when calculating an EFC.
• Veteran's education benefits are no longer considered financial assistance when determining eligibility for aid. (The questions were still asked on the 2009-2010 form, but the answers were not used for the determination; the questions were eliminated on the 2010-2011 and have remained gone.)

- data-sharing requirements:

• Applicants can now import their tax information from the IRS. The data is then sorted into the correct places on the form. (No more confusion about FAFSA deferred compensation.)

  In order to do this, marital status now has 4 possible answers so that IRS info can be correctly applied. The choices are: single, married/remarried, separated, and divorced/widowed.

• A marital status date is now mandatory if anyone answers anything but "single".

- user friendliness:

• Questions will not be asked that do not apply to your circumstances (based on your prior answers).
• There is clearer identification of whether questions are directed at students or parents.
• If data is incomplete or conflicting, the user will be be prevented from moving on.
• Instructions and help text is provided by clicking on a "?" icon.

This online form is a great improvement over the printable FAFSA application as far as ease of use, although there are advantages to being able to see all the questions at once. You can also now check the federal school codes list, before filing.

FAFSA Corrections and Renew FAFSA

• marital status
• balance of cash, savings, and checking accounts
• net worth of investments
• net worth of businesses
• dislocated worker

To allow yourself enough time so that corrections will not be needed, check your state's FAFSA deadline.


When renewing on the FAFSA website, your form will be prefilled with dependency answers from last year except for ones that might be different because the year has changed.