Add These Colleges to Your FAFSA

Today we’re talking about which colleges you should add to your FAFSA.

When you fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid at FAFSA.gov, it’s going to ask you which colleges you want to receive the information. And you’re going to include every college you have applied to, every college you will apply to, even if you haven’t submitted the application for admissions yet, and every college you might apply to, even if you haven’t finally decided if you’ll apply there after all.

There are a few reasons for this. First of all, some of the money from colleges is first-come, first-served. They have a budget, and when the money’s gone, it’s gone. You want to get to the front of the line by filling out your FAFSA and sending it to them sooner rather than later.

Second of all, some colleges have a priority deadline where if they don’t receive your FAFSA by a certain date, they won’t consider you for need-based grants or merit-based scholarships at all.

Third of all, colleges don’t care which application they receive first: Your application for admission, which you send to the admissions department, or this FAFSA, the application for financial aid, that goes to the financial aid department.

Now, what happens if you submit a FAFSA to a college and don’t wind up applying there? Absolutely nothing. The financial aid department receives the paperwork, but they never look at it because they don’t get an application in the admissions office so admissions doesn’t send the file over to them, triggering them to do any work on it. So there’s literally no harm, no foul.

Also, colleges can’t see which other schools you included on your FAFSA and impact your admissions decision in any way based on that. So there’s no concern about which schools you put on there.

For a college that is need-aware, meaning your ability to pay is one of the things they may consider in deciding whether or not to accept you, don’t hold off on submitting a FAFSA to that college. They are creating scholarships and grants for the students they really want. If you think you have a better chance of getting in by not showing them your financial position, you could wind up without the money they were willing to give you if you had just asked.

Now, the good news is if you decide later that there are other colleges that you’re now going to apply to, now you’ve made decisions you hadn’t thought of sooner, you can always log back into your StudentAid.gov account and click the “Add Colleges” button to send the FAFSA out to even more schools.

But get going. Put every college on there you can think of right now. If you have questions, call us at 732-556-8220. We are here to help.