Thousands of Students Missing Out on College Grants, Study Finds

The number of students filling out the Fafsa form has fallen in the pandemic, and the form is used to determine who gets federal Pell Grants, which are aimed at the needy.

Hundreds of thousands of students are missing out on free college aid because they are not completing a pesky federal form known as the Fafsa, a new analysis finds.

Roughly 1.7 million high school graduates didn’t file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in the 2020–21 school year. And just under half of them — about 813,000 students — were eligible for federal Pell Grants aimed at low-income students, according to a report by the National College Attainment Network, a nonprofit group that works on behalf of low-income and minority students. The average grant, which doesn’t need to be repaid, would have been almost $4,500.

All told, the high school class of 2021 left an estimated $3.7 billion in available Pell Grants unclaimed by failing to file the form, the network found. It said the number of students filing the Fafsa had dropped during the pandemic. Read the entire piece from the New York Time’s Anne Carrns here.