New FAFSA Will Help Millions of Students Get More Pell Grant Money for College
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Low-income students will get more help paying for college next year thanks to a new, more generous formula for awarding federal financial aid.
The expansion, new details of which the government released Wednesday, is part of a major revamp of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which millions of students fill out annually to get federal grants and student loans.
The redesigned FAFSA includes new calculations that will help an estimated 610,000 additional students from low-income backgrounds qualify for a federal Pell Grant, according to numbers published by the U.S. Department of Education Wednesday. Nearly 1.5 million more students who were already eligible for a Pell Grant will now qualify for the maximum award under the new formula.
The 2024-2025 FAFSA will also have fewer questions and feature a more user-friendly design. Altogether, these changes mark the biggest overhaul to the financial aid form in decades.
"We're doing our best to make this process as easy and as streamlined as possible, and hopefully people will see the difference this year," Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal tells Money.
There is still no official release date for the 2024-25 FAFSA, though the department said Wednesday that it plans to make the form available by Dec. 31.
