Higher Ed Utah

At the end of every Fall college semester, comes a very special and important time of year … A time that you spend with family … it’s not the holidays … it’s FAFSA (Free Application For Federal Student Aid) time!  Holiday fatigued parents and students usually regard the FAFSA in terror.  Mainly because of the vast amount of information the FAFSA needs in order to correctly determine the amount of federal aid that you or your student is entitled to.  But no longer will the word FAFSA leave you considering a sprint in the opposite direction because the new fafsa.gov website and features change everything.  Well, maybe not everything, but most definitely enough to make the FAFSA a headache-free process!

The website redesign is more user friendly and more secure in dealing with your personal information like your IRS tax returns.  When it comes to personal and tax information, who doesn’t want the utmost privacy and security?  The look is sleek and simple, there is now a big “start here” button on the home page for a quick and easy start and the site’s pages are very easily navigable.  As for the new features, they include cool new help options, the ability to skip over questions that do not apply to you and for 2011-2012, the site will tell you what to do based on your history there before.  Now, there is one last new feature you’ll need to know about before hitting the FAFSA hard and we’ve saved the best for last.  With the 2011-2012 FAFSA, your and your parent’s tax information can be loaded directly from IRS and used to auto-populate the tax portion of your application!  That’s right, no more going through stacks of papers to find Mom and Dad’s net income from this year and last!  To top it all off, we are already seeing some great feedback and testimonials about the new FAFSA site and features like this tweet: (Click to follow @uheaa)

@julsiej: “Finished the #fafsa & its so much easier than before. You just connect it to your tax forms! It took me 5 minutes”

And there you have it.  It took @julsiej just five minutes to fill out her entire FAFSA worksheet.  If every Utahn without a college education took five minutes out of their day to fill out a FAFSA and were given the ability to see how much aid they could receive from the government, they just might reconsider their decision to not go to college based solely on financial circumstances.

The easiest way to get the FAFSA done srats with your federal income taxes; get those filed as soon as possible! Then fill out the FAFSA on the Web to easily complete and submit your application!  On the other hand, if you haven’t filled out a FAFSA before, you can visit the new user friendly fafsa.gov site and utilize the great help features to navigate your way.  Faced with a tough FAFSA question?  Come to any of our FAFSA Completion Nights in February-March at several Utah high schools throughout the state.  At the events, financial aid professionals will go over the applications with you personally, answer any questions you may have and help you have the application ready for submission in no time.  These events are ABSOLUTELY FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC so make sure that you take full advantage and come out!

Click here for FAFSA Completion Night Schedule!