If you can get by without applying for Financial Aid at your college, is the FAFSA really required?
A Principal told us that filling out a FAFSA was required by law, but that doesn’t seem to be correct. Are the contents reported to your high school?
Has anyone found that the FAFSA is required of all students?
There must be some percentage that don’t ever fill one out.
Not correct, as far as I know. If you want to push back a little bit, ask the principal to cite the law.
No one is required to complete a FAFSA. That is a family choice.
No…the HS will not receive your FAFSA info.
Some colleges do require the FAFSA for even merit aid consideration. So check that.
And in some states it is necessary to file to qualify for state funded merit aid.
Also, if an emergency were to arise and a student needed a FA reconsideration, if one is not on file, the school can’t reassess need.
If financial aid needs to be reevaluated, the family can complete a FAFSA. But the school would not have the original info.
Of course it’s not required “by law.” It’s required for students who want to be eligible for federal assistance to pay for college. (And, as noted above, is sometimes also required as a condition of application for state assistance, institutional assistance, and/or private 3rd party scholarships.)
I agree with @Middkid86 above - you should absolutely confront the principal on this and ask him to cite the supposed law. There’s enough bad advice floating around without this guy contributing to the mess!
Some colleges and universities will not consider a student for financial aid in future years, no matter how severe the family’s financial reversal, if the student does not apply for aid at the very beginning.
There are a few colleges that have restrictions for US citizens who don’t apply their freshman year for aid…but not too many. There are many colleges that have this restriction for international students.
If you don’t need any kind of aid, I don’t think FAFSA is required. Note that many merit aid still require FAFSA.
So, basically we’ve got;
I wonder if there is any kind of honors you might want to apply for that involves money whether or not it is needed as part of the financial aid package.
@dodgersmom Yeah, I didn’t think so either, but the principal isn’t in the picture anymore. If the school has access, I really think she just wanted to see the financial information.
How would the high school have access to your FAFSA?
I assume they get it for local scholarships?
If a local organization is offering the scholarship, they are the ones who would get what need based info you submit.
Right…the sponsor for the local scholarship gets the FAFSA…if they even request it. Not the school.
@JustOneDad, I have had the same question for my DD (who is a junior this year - so we haven’t crossed that bridge yet). In the back of my mind, I recall hearing that some colleges that offer federally financed work study positions will offer the open slots to students not on any kind of financial aid, once all the kids that receive aid have been hired. Sometimes the positions can be really interesting and academic-related, and it may be possible that students would need to have a FAFSA on file for this scenario (even if they didn’t apply for aid).
This scenario may be 100% wrong, and it’s something I will be looking into in the coming months. We prefer to keep our financial information private unless we know of a firm benefit to putting it out there, so I am interested in this thread. Thank you for posting it.
As one of the taxpayers who funds the work study program, I sincerely hope this is not true. It would constitute fraud on the part of the institution receiving the federal work study funds.
^ S/he might’ve meant that if all WS students have WS jobs, the extra jobs open up to non-WS students. This is certainly possible. I know at my UG, WS students were given priority in things like cafeteria jobs but then the jobs opened up to non-WS students as well.
Yeah, that was one of our concerns, too, but what we have generally found is that there are enough similar jobs and opportunities that don’t require work study. In some cases, opportunities that were originally listed as work-study still became available, so they must have jostled funding around or something.
It seems possible that there would be opportunities that were only work-study which would require a FAFSA despite not having been awarded a financial aid package, but we haven’t run into them.
It’s not uncommon to hear people say you must file one, but haven’t gotten to the bottom of anything like that yet.
Work study funded jobs can only be given to students who receive WS in their financial aid awards.
My son applied for a job as an orchestra manager when he was a freshman. He was the only applicant, and was also well qualified to do the job. BUT it was a work study job. He didn’t have WS…so they couldn’t hire him. The job went unfilled the entire school year.