Please note that this transcript was auto-generated. We apologize for any minor errors in spelling or grammar.

Jennifer Bento: [00:00:00] All right. Hello and welcome to this morning’s webinar, uh, learn about FAFSA Completion Reports. Uh, this is, uh, part of our MEFA Institute. Uh, my name is Jennifer Bento Pinon. I’m director of K 12 Services here at MEFA, and I’ll be moderating. Um. Today’s, uh, webinar, uh, I’d like to introduce our Esteem Presenter, NAL Fuentes, uh, college and Career Readiness Coordinator at dsi, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Uh, we have a full agenda of topics today, uh, and Nile will specifically share, uh, the importance of the Edwin Analytics reports and how they can help, uh, your school and your students. So if you have any questions during this session, please uh, drop them in the q and a. We’ll bring them forth to Nile. Uh, we are recording this session and we’ll share the slides and the recording.

So if you have to leave early, no problem. Also this, um, [00:01:00] one other thing, this, uh, session is eligible for on PDP. Uh, so the link to the evidence of learning form will be in our follow-up email as well. Alright, so we’ll turn it over to Nile, take it away.

Nyal Fuentes: Thank you very much and, uh, welcome everyone to this lovely Thursday morning after yesterday’s downpours, at least across most of the PO.

Commonwealth. I’m Nile. I work at Desi and I’m here to walk through a bunch of our FAFSA stuff that we own. So at the beginning, in full disclosure, I looked this morning in the FAFSA tool in Edwin is not live. Um, I’m expecting it very soon, hopefully in the next, hopefully tomorrow. There is what they call ICER data, which is data that comes from USED, us, US Department of Education and gets sent into mass aid where that’s how we start to distribute financial aid and that information goes out to schools and colleges, et cetera.

Um, so data is there, I imagine it’s the matching mechanism that’s taking place. So hopefully tomorrow or Monday. [00:02:00] We will have actually data live in the tool, and I apologize for that. I, we scheduled this and initially me fund myself hoping that the tool will be live and you could look at it. We wouldn’t just be out being you to have like on theory, but actually reality here.

So it is coming, um, very soon and much sooner than last year, which was like March or something like that. Or maybe it was even May before the was live because of all the problems you probably know. Um. FAFSA is live and kids are applying for kids and adults, potential college students and college students are applying for fafsa.

Um, I’m gonna talk a little bit about fafsa. I’m assuming that everyone in this room kind of has a knowledge of fafsa, but wanna make sure we’re making sure everyone’s on the same page. Talk a little about the state financial aid overview. These first two, I’m basically just giving you some information.

I’m not an expert on the state financial aid overview. These are, uh, department of Higher Education slides. They’re great. They give a lot of information. We know that each individual student has a lot of different, um, issues and challenges sometimes facing their [00:03:00] applications. So it’s always gonna be good to dig in with our osfa partners who are state financial aid director.

Um, but I wanted everyone kind of information about the good news. That we’re bringing about a lot of, um, financial aid being available, particularly for low income kids and Commonwealth. Um, the things I am expert on, you know, as much as I know as much as anyone else, these last two that you see on this slide, and I hope everyone sees these slides, um, around fasta completion data review around kind of looking back to see what it looks like, some of the good news and bad news around fasta completion.

And then, um, the Edwin reports, which I will go through, and those are hopefully again, tomorrow or Monday will be live. You can jump in and see which kids have already completed fafsa, which is great news considering it’s it’s mid-December. Um, and we can start to really catch up on getting kids to have access and opportunity to, um, state and federal financial aid resources.

I’ll also talk a little bit about mafa and tuition equity. Again, not an expert, but very important as far as our students. Um. Who might not be eligible to file [00:04:00] file for FAFSA for a lot of different reasons are eligible for state financial aid. So I’ll go briefly over a lot of stuff. Um, there’ll be a tornado of information and um, you can always contact me or in the case of financial aid, specifically oso folks to get more info.

And there are some of the people here, a lot of people in this room are looking at this list who know more than I do about this topic. Um, might drink it, friends particularly. Um, so again, FAFSA is a free application for federal student aid. Um, we use it pretty much for all federal aid and also for state aid to determine eligibility.

Um, it’s supposedly, it’s been improved. I’m in FAFSA zone right now with my. Senior daughter, um, try to get this done. Getting the FSA id, a lot of it is pretty easy for people who kind of have all their financial stuff. In order for other families. It’s very challenging because you have, you know, there’s a lot of challenges with a parent being here and a parent being there.

Um, some parents might be undocumented, et cetera, et cetera, et [00:05:00] cetera. So it’s very complicated for some people, very easy for others. We know that cost, um, continues to be a barrier for a lot of our students. To access post-secondary education, and particularly for students who are going for the first time.

And we know that parents who, and families who see things like a $35,000 bill for UMass, it’s more money than they’ve ever earned in a year in their life. It can be very daunting. Um, and of course you wanna talk to families about the availability, particularly for low income families of a lot of state and federal aid for them to, um.

Get into their higher education opportunities, and we’ll talk about community college as well in a second. It really is the most important step you can do about paying for college other than being a, um, born a millionaire. Um, so as far as, you know, getting the aid necessary to fulfill all your educational hopes and dreams, this is critical and I’m happy to, questions along the way, these are pretty basic ones, but, um.

Oops. Um, so I think the Commonwealth has made a lot of, and this is Department of Higher Ed slides here. [00:06:00] We’ve made a lot of progress in making our schools more affordable. Um, as you know, um, Massachusetts instate tuition is probably one of the highest instate tuitions in the country. Um, tuition and fees, ’cause we know tuitions are low, fees are high.

Um, so traditionally in the past. 10, 15, 20 years. Um, Massachusetts public education’s been pretty expensive compared to other if you were born in other states. Um, we’ve made some real progress. We have tuition and fee free community college now. We’ll talk about this for a second. Mass grant plus and mass grant plus expansion has made, um, college much more affordable, particularly for low income and low middle income students.

Um, the tuition equity law has, um, and Mafa has have opened a door for a lot of students who have lived here a long time. Um, been. You know, residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for years and not had access to, um, financial aid. And we even have kids who didn’t even, didn’t even know they were undocumented until they get to this point.

I mean, you might have had kids like this, um, [00:07:00] until they were filling out, trying to fill out fafsa, get aid for college, and kind of seen their hopes and dreams kind of extinguished because, um, they didn’t have proper documentation to receive financial federal financial aid. So a little bit about that. Um.

This is the number. I mean, this is an amazing thing. If you look at this very simple bar chart, um, over double, uh, the amount of financial aid for the state that’s been applied here, again, as a relatively state that gavere relatively low amounts of state financial aid, really huge increases in this. And again, this is thanks to the, um, so-called millionaires tax, where these funds are coming from.

So we’re hoping, you know. I think the idea is that for FY 26 and beyond is that even if kind of revenues kind of dec decline, hopefully this millionaires tax will be able to keep up this funding for, um, state financial aid. But again, huge increases thanks to, um, the legislature, new administration who really, um, showing the value [00:08:00] of, um, public education.

Again, free community college is the big piece. Right? So for a lot of kids, and I think we did a previous webinar, if you were in that before, about the idea of under matching and making sure kids are making the best decision for themselves. Um, a lot of times people see something for free. I. Like, I’m gonna take that because it’s free.

It might not be the best thing for you, but for a lot of students and certainly our, our seniors going into on into college, but certainly also adult students, the idea that they can, you know, enhance their skills, move towards a, um, an associate’s degree certificate, and even a bachelor’s degree with transfer, um, income is not a factor for these students.

So again, for your students who are, and there’s a lot of middle class students who feel they could never, um. Attend a four year college and pull that bull Bill, bill, excuse me. Could be bull two. Um, but so we really need to look, educate our students to realize that if this is, you know, this is one of your options that you have about attending college and having no tuition or fees that are involved in [00:09:00] that attendance.

You know, there’ll be books and transportation and housing, things of that nature, but everything else is covered. So this is a great opportunity for a lot of students. Um. Mass Educate is what it’s called. Um, I don’t know if to necessarily read the slide. The real one important thing I wanna talk about mass educate.

’cause we went back and forth in this for a while. I didn’t understand it. It is what’s called last dollar financial assistance. So it’s not like they’re just giving you free community college and then you get to keep your PEs and you get to keep, if you get SEOG or whatever, you get it. It is about, it’s after you use up those PEs, et cetera, then it becomes the last dollar.

They make sure that it costs you nothing out of pocket. To attend that. Attend. So it’s really important to inform students here that they’re not gonna be able to keep their, you know, I can’t remember, is it 5,000 pills? I apologize, I can’t remember. It. Be a little more as the maximum. They’re not gonna be able to just keep that money and use it for, um, housing and transportation, et cetera.

So they might still have to look for federal aid to, um, help to, you know, fill in the gaps, maybe [00:10:00] even loans in some cases. But it is a huge, huge movement in, um, affordability for a lot of our students. Um, again, here’s some more about free community colleges. Uh, I’m a Cape Cod Community College graduate, so I, you know.

These fellows in here. Um, it kinda gives you a little indication and I think that, um, Jen, Jennifer will send these, um, slides and PDFs to folks. Um, if not, you can contact me and I’ll send them to you. Um, but this is some good information about what it looks like. And again, um, all the community college websites have very good information about this.

I’ve, I’ve heard rumors it’s 10 and 15% enrollment increases after years of kind of decline, enrollment increases in. Decreases in community colleges. So this is a great movement across the commonwealth, both, um, for our colleges, for our students, and for the local economies. ’cause kids who go to, not just kids, excuse me, I guess students who go to community colleges tend to stay in that area, um, get higher paying jobs, pay more taxes, everything good happens.

This is an [00:11:00] amazing, um, movement in, um, kind of the. You know, educational structure of Massachusetts without affordability again, um, there’s some differences in mass reconnect, which tends to be for older students. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t understand difference in Mass Connect and, um, mass reconnect and, um, mass educate.

Let’s just say for a student it doesn’t matter. ’cause it doesn’t matter how old you are, it’s probably how they’re funding it. And again, I’m gonna defer to Osfa, um, office of Student Financial Aid, if you want any details or this. Focus on the student facing piece of this and, uh, the affordability for those folks.

Um, expanding Mass grant plus, so going beyond community colleges. Um, we’re talking about free tuition and fees, um, at higher at all institutions of higher education for low income students. Enormous. Right? We know also here, and I just wanna put, I’m always, you know, let’s put out the caveat and, um, and go away with the propaganda.

Um, but for these four year schools, they’re, you’re still not to pick up room and board. So there’s gonna be [00:12:00] some use of, um, federal aid to probably cover that and that type of thing. Um, and that’s available at all nine state universities and, and the four UMass campuses. Three plus actually three. But, um, because we don’t count Worcester, ’cause I don’t think kids are going middle right to medical school.

Um, so this, this is a great opportunity for four years. So for your students who have heard the kind of news and stuff about, um, community college, but they really have, you know, worked hard and they wanna go into this program and it just happens to be at Bridgewater State, encourage them to do that because it will be affordable.

For those students. Uh, and the loans, even though they do take loans for room and board, are gonna be much lower than they were, you know, five years ago when, um, their older brothers or sisters by doing, going again, more information on this. I’ll send the slides to you. Um, we’re supporting all full and part-time Pell eligible kids.

Um, you encourage the complete, you have to do the fafsa, you have to do the master. So there were cases, a friend of mine is a, I dunno if she’s on this call, but, um, a community college, [00:13:00] a financial aid person in Western Mass. And she said kids were just walking up thinking like, where’s my free community college?

And wanting to sign up for glasses. They still have to do mass fund, um, or fafsa, usually FAFSA in most cases by the financial aid deadline. So make sure that your kids are. Um, keeping track of, um, what those dates are and when there’s eligibility pieces, because again, a lot of these state schools are also giving merit scholarships and other things beyond this.

So important to pay close attention to this, to kind of put together the best package for students available expansion. Again, this talks about giving, um. To kids who aren’t low income but are kind of low middle income. Um, but again, really pay attention to what’s going on. If you’re looking at the s sei, SAI and that type of information about who, um, who might be, um, eligible for this level of financial aid.

Um, alright, switching, switching gears here real quickly, talking about tuition equity. I think most of you probably have heard about the tuition equity law. We [00:14:00] know we’re entering this tuition equity law at a time of uncertainty at the federal level. Um, but this is a state law and this is access to state financial aid.

So this is a whole idea that the law carves a pathway for in-state tuition rates, which is huge. A lot of these kids are paying international rates in the past, not even out of state, um, and state financial aid for certain non-US citizens, including undocumented students. The, the caveat here, again, these are students who’ve lived here three years or more, and they’re in the high school diploma or GD High set and the commonwealth.

This is a very important piece. So this is not gonna apply to your newcomer students. And I don’t know what type of carve out there will be for those students in the future, but you have to have been here for three years or more. This is kind of the intent I think politically, and I shouldn’t speak politically ’cause I work for government, but I will, um, is that they wanted to kind of reward kids and families that have lived here for a long time.

Um, gone to high school again, some of these kids not even knowing they were undocumented [00:15:00] until. Um, it got to this point, so, um, this is a huge move. I’m part of the Commonwealth. Other states have done this, including big states like Texas, um, have done this type of thing. And, um, we finally moved in this direction.

You can see, see a little bit of numbers. The numbers weren’t huge last year, but still that’s 500 students who were Massachusetts Public school students who had access to state financial aid. Again, not federal, but state Night financial aid. There’s a slight delay in mafa. Don’t panic. That has nothing to do with what’s happening in, um, politically.

It really has to do with, um, FAFSA being a little later. And they, they basically build the master tool, meaning regions, who’s the company who does this based on, um, what that FAFSA looks like. So hopefully that all makes sense. Um, a little bit more about what a high school completer is, and there’s an affidavit of it involved that you have to do.

Um, I found all these cool pictures of people to make it, make things a. So that’s basically what the question law, law is in a nutshell. [00:16:00] This is a little bit about the mafa. Again, it’s available right now in English, Spanish, um, this is how you get into it. Um, it looks like the fafsa. Um, and anyway, you can read the slide, but this is kind of what’s happening and again, it’s for kids who cannot do FAFSA for the most part.

Alright, any questions here before I actually start talking about stuff I know about? No. Right. Either nobody cares about me or I’m doing an amazing job. Um, surprisingly the fastest complet of the last year is sort of disaster and it remains to be seen what this year will be. Um, fast window actually opened about six days earlier than they said it was gonna open.

Five or six days. Um, many students, their families have already done fafsa. Again, we did see some, I didn’t see it. A colleague of mine saw some of the data in something called Snowflake, which is the database. So we know the data is flowing. It’s just not in the tool yet, so it should be in there pretty soon.

So we know kids, I’ve completed fafsa, my daughter has not finished it, [00:17:00] which is not good since I’m talking about every other, the other 70,000 seniors in the Commonwealth, but not my own. Um, but this is happening and people are interested. A lot of times when we talk about our FAFSA tool. FAFSA report.

There’s an Edwin. We know that there’s certain kids, there’s kids that have already been accepted to college. My daughter’s been accepted to colleges already, um, where friends have gotten their first choice colleges in early decision. So we know those kids are gonna do fafsa, they’re on top of it, et cetera.

Real power of the FAFSA report is gonna talk about those kids who may not complete fafsa, don’t know what FAFSA is, um, are kind of, you know, are struggling to put everything together. ’cause it can gets complicated for some families for a lot of different reasons. So that’s really where the FAFSA tool is gonna be valuable.

I do want to go a little bit over. Um, we have seen real drops both in college enrollment, and again, this is like last year, not this year. This year in 2024 September, we’re actually seeing increases because of, I think, free community college and that type of thing. Um, in college attendance, we’ve seen drops in [00:18:00] college attendance, we’ve seen drops in FAFSA completion.

The two kind of go along each other there. Concordant. But the real thing that strikes me is the students who could benefit most low-income kids who can, you know, really, um, benefit the most from FAFSA and get the most aid. Only a little over a third of those students are completing FAFSA about, you know, again, 51% of changes a little bit every day.

’cause there’ll be a few more kids every day, even completing last year’s fafsa, um, and low income kids. Pretty high level still. So really thinking about this longitudinally, we always like to show information longitudinally. We had a, you know, a little bit of a drop during Covid in 2 20 20 for obvious reasons, but we really haven’t recovered that much.

In fact, we’ve dropped since 2020 again. Um, so this is something we’re really trying to pay attention to. We know that fewer kids are going to college, a smaller percentage and a lower number. Um, you have a lower percentage, plus you have fewer students who are seniors. Um. You know, there’s a [00:19:00] decline in public school enrollment as well.

So really trying to pay attention to this and really focus on equity and our student groups that could benefit from this the most. Um, similarly for race, ethnicity, um, Latino students are the large, fastest growing population in the commonwealth. Um, and you’ll see a real drop here, excuse me, in 2017 it was kinda like the high point of Latino college attendance and it really has dropped.

A bit, and again, FAFSA kind of runs concurrently with that as well. And you’ll see here, I’m not sure how to explain this Asian drop in FAFSA completion. I’ve only studied that much. I checked it three times to see if it was right and it was right. And I, I still, I would like to know what the heck is going on with that piece there.

But again. Generally lower rates completion, something that, you know, Commonwealth would definitely wanna turn around. We want more kids going higher ed for a lot of different reasons. We want baccalaureate students. We want kids that are gonna go on beyond baccalaureate. We want kids getting certificates from community [00:20:00] colleges and highly needed skills across Commonwealth.

There’s lots of different reasons that we need fasted to complete. And again, fasta completion doesn’t mean you have to go to college. It just gives you that opportunity. So we wanna see kids even say, even though they’re saying, oh, I don’t think I’m gonna college miss, it’s like, well, it doesn’t hurt you because you might decide in July that you want to go to North Shore Community College and do hvac, um, heating, ventilation, air conditioning.

I don’t even know if they have hvac, but just pretend that they do. Um, you know, they want these skills and I wanna go. And then, you know, mama doesn’t want you staying in the basement unless you are in school. And there’s lots of different reasons that kids can do faf just. Gives ’em the opportunity to do so.

And again, looking at this one, race, ethnicity, if we’re thinking of equity, um, for our black and Latino students particularly, um, this is something that really gets us in the head pretty cl closely and wants us to do better. Uh, and I did some other dis aggregations ’cause people always want to know, we know that boys are, um, as far as our education go, are in trouble.

They’re not going to college. Um, those rates have really dropped here. [00:21:00] And some of these rates are, these gaps are. Kind of nutty. And again, I could do all sorts of desegregations, I could do low income, Hispanic male EL and whatever, but it would just, there would just be a lot. You can do this. And when we get into Edwin Tool, and the reason I put the source here, um, for the Edwin tool is that you can do this in your own district, right?

You can look at this information to be like, oh, wow, none of our black males did fafsa. Let’s talk to a local group, um, of African American professionals that’s gonna, I’m just making this up. We’re gonna come in and talk to our boys. About college and that type of thing. So really thinking about this, you know, without, um, people who talk about equity, equity, equity, we really can’t have, um, equity without looking at these data.

All right. Onto the tool. Any questions on our presentation here? Nope. Alright, well gonna fly through this presentation. Get back to our days. Um, so this is the most important part to me as far as level expertise. Again, [00:22:00] hopefully live tomorrow or Monday. Um, there’s a link in this presentation, which we’ll send to you that kind of is a description of everything I talked about today.

So if you wanna show it to your principal or other counselors to get a general view of what it is. I think a lot of times people come to a webinar like this and they, they have this information, they get excited. Then there’s just like, well, how do I explain this to, um, doctor, um Louise, our principal about.

You know what it is. So this little two page, dis, three page description, faft tool can be helpful. Um, essentially there are two different reports in Edwin Analytics. You need Edwin Access from your district. The department, my department cannot give you access to these tools. It’s up to the district to give you access to Edwin.

It’s through the security portal. I’ll show you something in a second about that. And um, also to give you what’s called administration level. I know that’s a bad choice of words, but administration level means that you can look at student level data or what data people would call PII personally identified information, [00:23:00] um, that it’s really essential that you have that level.

’cause you wanna see the individual students that are, have completed or not completed fafsa. Um. There’s administrative, your data person’s gonna say to you, we can’t give you that. ’cause you’ll see student, I mean teacher evaluations. It’s not true. There’s two different versions. There is a administration version that you have student level access, and there’s one that you have evaluation access.

If you don’t need evaluation access in Edwin, don’t give it to you. But you can, you can look at that and I can send a link to anyone who’s having a problem. Contact me and I’ll send you to the page that talks about Edwin, what’s called Edwin Security roles. Um, these data are, um, they’re taken from. USED, so the FAFSA people in DC get the information from, you know, students and their families filling it out.

They send it to the Commonwealth, specifically Department of Higher Education. And, um, the, one of the issues, and I’ll talk about this a little bit with the matching, is we have what’s called SaaS as student identifiers. They have social security numbers. We do not have social security numbers in our, any [00:24:00] of our systems.

So the match between, I’m gonna talk about this a couple times and don’t worry about right now, the match is sometimes imperfect. We’re not capturing every student that completed fafsa. Um, some of the students will have completed it. We couldn’t do a match on their names. I’ll talk about that in a later slide, but it’s pretty, it, we get up to like 95 to 97% of students in the match.

Um, you’ll never have a case of a false negative where a student didn’t complete fafsa, it says they did. Um, it’ll be the other way around it. A student will have completed fafsa. It’ll say they didn’t. So you don’t have to worry about, um, the only thing that’s gonna be wrong is you gotta chase down a kid who has already completed FAFSA and they’re gonna be like, miss, I already did it.

But, um, if you’re talking to a kid more than once, it’s pretty much okay, at least for you, maybe not for them. Um, the data will be updated once you get started. Probably updated multiple times weekly. So there tends to be a week drag between a student and their family doing their FAFSA and it showing up in the report.

So if a student did their report, and sometimes students don’t have a good relationship with time, it’s like, oh, we just did that three [00:25:00] weeks ago and it was actually, you know, Friday. Um, just remember that it will eventually be in there and it moves on pretty quickly. This is kinda what it looks like. And I’m gonna show you something in, um, in our test environment, which isn imperfect, but it, um, we’ll show you a little bit about what the information looks like.

I just think it’s easier that way. But this is what Edwin looks like. This is my friend Kate’s slide. Um, you sign into security portal, you have to verify your identity. They’ll make you verify the code, and then boom, you’re gonna go into Edward Analytics. You’re not going to Edward Analytics training, you’re not gonna see your kids’ information.

Use the Edward Analytics link and it will take you to something that looks like this. You can use the search box and search for fafsa, or you can search for CR 3 0 7 or C oh 6 0 7, um, and you kind of, or you can hit on what it says high school and beyond, which is that what I usually do. Um, also you need to hit the green button.

You’ll be surprised about how many calls I get. It’s like I’m only seeing these data and not the data I’m doing filters for. You need if that, if that thing is green, you need to hit review report. It’s gonna pull up the [00:26:00] report. Um, we have two reports, and again, I’m gonna show you kind of a mockups of these.

Um, one is the 3 0 7 report, and that’s the report that kind of shows your whole district and school. So it’ll show you this. Many kids have, um, this is a number of seniors and what we call SP students. Students are, um, special education but not in a particular grade in your school. Um, that’s usually a pretty small number and we’ll share the number of kids who submitted, the number of kids who are incomplete.

A number of students who are found, when it says found, it means that student has completed fafsa. And I’ll show you all sorts of information. I’ll show you that in a second. Um, so that’s, that’s kind of what the 3 0 7 school district level, if you click on, um, the school that you’re in, it will something called a 6 0 7 report.

And that’s an actual list of students. So we’ll show you everyone from ABI to Zane Zon, um, A to Z. That’s my little screen. Tribute to Duke basketball and, um, using the alphabet, um, they really show you every student in your [00:27:00] school and what their status is as far as FAFSA goes. And there’s also a sheet in there that has unmatched kids.

So it’s kids who said they went to their school, your school. Um, on the fafsa, but we pull up an unmatched seat and sometimes those will have kids that do go to your school, but you can do a match. Uh, it’s a little complicated, but it’s allows you to really capture every student. Some of those students might have gone to your school in the past and they just put your, their, your school down, so that’s why they’re showing up there.

Um, again, about two, three times a week. The thing that gets confusing is you’re gonna, you’re gonna, if you open a report today, you’re gonna say, oh, 2024, 2025. And it’s like, Nope. Um, the way fasta works is based on the award year, so it’s gonna be talking about next year when they’re actually getting the award.

So for current seniors, it’s gonna be 25, 26. Sorry, this is the part where I lose my voice. Um, again, as submitted as, as submitted or not found. I’ll show you that in a second. Um, and some is complete or incomplete. So incomplete usually means, and this is good information ’cause sometimes we, like you didn’t do a signature, you didn’t put your [00:28:00] social security number or your name might have mismatched for some reason.

I’ll talk about that in a second while I show you the report. Um, I’m gonna show you this, but this is kind of what the school and district report looks like. Again, I, Abby Kelly’s the first one in the alphabet, so it always shows up and it’ll show you kinda this information here where it talks about the number of students, either on a state or district level, how many submitted.

So again, submitted means those people have submitted. Um, hit that button that said go. Complete means that that student is completely complete, they’re done, they can move on with their life. FAFSA is done for this, this year for them. Um, incomplete means that, again, they’re missing something like a signature.

I know I’m doing this twice. Just to, um, remind people and not found means again that we could not do a match. Usually that means they did not complete fafsa. Sometimes it means they did FAFSA but we couldn’t match their name. And a lot of times the matching name has to do either with, um, Hispanic or Asian naming conventions.

Um, Hispanic naming conventions tend to use with the e you know, the Y, so [00:29:00] Fuentes Torella instead of Fuentes and they can’t do the match ’cause it doesn’t click the same name. And there are a lot of, um, Asian students who also will have a name that they gave to school. That tends to be a more Americanized, I’m drawing, I’m drawing with a broad brush here.

Um, so they might be Kim, but their name might be an actual Korean name, A name in Korean when they did fafsa. So you’re not doing a complete match or the date, the birth date. This is usually a very common one too. They use a European, um, date convention where they flip, um, the month and year. That also screws up the matches.

’cause we can only match unlimited information. That’s first, last name, um, middle name, uh, date of birth, and usually school. So, you know, we’re doing the best we can with the matches. And again, it gets to 95% or so, but some kids will be missing. And if you’re in a place like Lawrence or, or with a lot of Latino kids who might use, you know, at naming convention, you might have more missing than others.

Um, this is what the student level report. I’ll show you this in a second. [00:30:00] Um, looks like, again, you’re gonna have your district name, your high school name, Sid, all that information. If the SID is blue, it always means you can click on it and get a student profile report for those who have seen this. So you’ll see all sorts of information about that student.

Um, we’ve also added this tool, um, demographic information. And this demographic information really, I think helps you to, um, kind of look at it and make sure that you’re, you’re, you know, being equitable in your FAFSA completion services in particular populations. Lots of different here. There’ll also be a completion date, and so you can see all information there.

So, great amounts of information here that will be rolling in pretty soon. Um, I’m gonna do this and show you the tool just because it’s easier me to switch from the PowerPoint to, um, going to, uh. So Alex said they did fafsa, and this is gonna happen to you, you know, a few weeks. You are gonna chase down the student, or I call Alex and you’ll say, you said you completed fafsa, but I’m not [00:31:00] seeing you here.

Um, the next thing you wanna do is you might wanna jump down to the unmatched file. Again, you can look at this unmatched file. They’re like, okay, Alex, you’re right there. I see what happened. You put Alexandra instead of Alexandria or um, NATO C Ramos instead of NATOs or the date you usually see. It’s like, okay, you’re all set.

So sometimes you can download all these tools into Excel and sometimes it’s easier just to, you know, bring out, go old school, bring out your marker and highlighter and just say, who are the kids I have to talk to? Check those kids off. And then, you know. Done your due diligence. Um, so it’s just, remember, remember that some kids will say they did it.

Sometimes there’ll be a time delay if they said they did it and you, or you sat down and did it with them, um, check that unmatched list and you usually gonna find them. There’s no way to really fix that unmatched list. You know, there’s like 70,000 high school kids and, um, they’re not letting Nile go through and talk to, um, Jen Bullard and it, and fix, fix the sheet.

Um, so that’s gonna be, that’ll be an issue for many of you. Um, I’m. [00:32:00] Happy to stop for any questions or concerns. I know I talk fast. Uh,

Jennifer Bento: we don’t have any open questions at this time. Nile,

Nyal Fuentes: I must be a genius. Very,

Jennifer Bento: very thorough.

Nyal Fuentes: Yeah. Alright, so this is the Edwin training environment. Did everyone see this?

Jen? Um. This, maybe I’ll go back to, let’s see if I really screwed this up. Yep. Alright, so here’s where I went into Edwin Analytics. It’s gonna look something like this. It’s not exactly the same because, um, trading environment’s older and looks a little bit different, but the data’s mostly the same. I, I tend to look at this ’cause I’m like, okay, what am I looking for?

And I got our high school and beyond. Um, just so you know, post-secondary success. And this has nothing to do with fafsa, but just to show you. We’ll give you report to tell you where your kids went to college. So those of you who haven’t used this tool, this report will tell you where your kids as as late as 2023.

We don’t have 2024 in here yet. Went to college, so this is [00:33:00] helpful. It is also not the FAFSA report, but that’s in success. ’cause that’s still kind of after something happens, I go to post-secondary readiness. And you can see here the CR 3 0 7 and CR three. CR 6 0 7 are the ones that are, um, we’re gonna talk about today that are FAFSA related.

And again, you can always go to the search box in the upper right and just search for fafsa and these will come up. I’m gonna show you the 3 0 7. And again, you have to pardon me because this is a training environment. It has sort of real data, but not really, um, because we need to protect, um, student privacy.

Um, so yeah, there’s no such thing as high eco high, um, in the Commonwealth. But give you an example. So this is, um. Usually this would have a state and a district. Of course, you can’t see where I’m pointing. This should have a state and district number, right that we saw in like the screenshot that will tell you kind of the number of students who have submitted, how many of those are complete, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

In this case, obviously this doesn’t be early in this year. It’s [00:34:00] not found, which is the students who have not done FAFSA is pretty high. Um, but let’s just pick on average high. So anytime you see this blue link, it’s magic in Edwin. I mean, you can go somewhere else. So I wanna look at, you know, I’m working with the whole district.

I have four high schools or whatever. I pick a particular high school. And again, it takes a little time for this whole thing to p to to come up. Um, the view report thing, if that was green, so the upper right hand side, um, would be what you’d have to hit. But this is what the data looks like, except all these fields will be filled up.

Um, it’s gonna give you, um, your district code, your high school code. The name of the student, um, the sas, I’m gonna show you something sa a second date of birth. Um, all the, all the demographic information you need. And again, the key piece, FASTA completion. FASTA completion can change from time to time.

There are kids who complete it, then they go in and say, oh, I made a mistake. So it’s hard to do this, um, longitudinally during the year. Like [00:35:00] if your whole thing is, I wanna see how many kids complete it in December. Some of those students, a small number will go back in and they’ll redo it and the redo will be the latest date.

Um, in here you’ll see that they submitted fafsa. Yes. What’s the status in this case? Complete? Um, where it says detail here all the way to the right. That’s gonna be, if it’s incomplete, see if they’re any complete. I don’t think there’s any incomplete incompleteness file. Unfortunately there’s not. Um, that will give you an idea of.

Um, what they’re missing. So we’ll see something like no signature, et cetera. Uh, the beauty of this too is if you go up to this export function up here, um, I think that’s popping up. I strongly recommend that you download this into Excel. This allows you to kind of like, ’cause sometimes if you’re looking at, you know, 500 kids, it’s, it’s just mind blowing to you.

So if you can kind of look at the list and like, okay, I can, I can filter out all the ones that are complete. Like, ’cause they’re already done. It really allows you to do some work locally on what it looks like. If you are having [00:36:00] problems with this tool or something seems really kooky, always use this.

Contact us, um, button. It will go to our IT folks and if it is related to a program thing, it will probably come to me. If it’s related to a data technical nerdy thing, um, they’ll try to fix it or figure it out. Again. A lot of times if a student’s gonna sh not showing up, there will be an unmatched file at the bottom.

So it’s not in this one for some reason. But there will be an unmatched file, which will have no demographics. ’cause we have no idea. We are not matching, we can’t match it with sim ’cause we don’t have information. But there will be a list of names and usually you can look at it and be like, okay, you’re right there.

Um, when people call me about this and we talk about it, usually I find the date of birth and like, yeah, it’s the wrong date of birth. That’s what happened here. Um, we would be really helpful though. If you do see something that’s a complete anomaly that you hit that contact us, us button. I’m not sitting here doing the matches.

This is, these are people that are. Much more technically savvy than I am to let them know what’s going on. And just on a side, um, looking at this, these [00:37:00] Blue SA acids, um, if you have this level of access to here, you can always click on this Blue SA and see a lot more about the student. And I think a lot of you might have used this tool already.

It’s called the PR 600. Um, this gives you an actual report about you. Well, these are all gonna, you know, these are all your students right now, your seniors. It’ll give you a lot of information about that senior. So if you don’t know that senior very well, I mean, you can usually get local records. Uh, nothing’s showing up.

I don’t know why that’s not showing up. I, oh. Extraordinarily. It gives you a ton of information. There might be something wrong in the actual, um, training environment in a real environment. It’s gonna give you a list of kind of where that kid attended. So if it’s a new student to you, you can see who there.

You can kinda look at the courses they took as they reported to the state, um, what mc a scores are and things of that nature. I will try one more click unless it was just that one, but I think there might be, it might be about the training environment.[00:38:00]

I apologize. I don’t use the training environment that much. I usually look to real kids.

Yeah, there’s something going on with the training environment. I apologize, but please take a look at that. ’cause I think it’s a very helpful, you know, even do a test on a kid, you know, to see what it looks like and, um, anyway. So that is my show for the day. Happy to take any questions?

Jennifer Bento: No, there was one question that came up. Um. From, uh, from from Anne. She said she can see her FAFSA completion report from 2020 3 24. When will the current 12th grader report be available?

Nyal Fuentes: I, I’m hoping, I, I, I was saying that there’s, I know this is confusing. There is something called mass aid, which is where kind of all these data live after they come from the feds, there’s data showing up there, so I know it’s [00:39:00] gonna happen hopefully tomorrow or Friday.

At the worst by next week. Um, I was checking with Kantha from SFA and she said like, yeah, there’s data there and it should be flowing, and they’re gonna try to figure out what the issue is. Um, I’m hoping it’s tomorrow. I’m hoping it’s later today. Usually magical stuff happens on Thursday nights. I know that sounds crazy, but we do a lot of updates there.

So hopefully it’s there tomorrow, if not Monday. If not, I’m gonna start to be annoyed. Um, but they are working hard, um, and trying to get this done. It function that they’ve tried to really, uh, make come faster. Once a data comes, it’s just gonna flow really fast. So I beg your, um, take your grace and I beg your, um, what do they call it, patients on this as we try to get it rolling.

And I was hoping, you know, I was annoyed this morning, wasn’t there? I’m not gonna lie. Um, ’cause I was hoping to be all impressive and, you know. Usually, a lot of times people from state let you down and I didn’t wanna be that guy, but here I am again. Um, so hopefully, um, really quickly in the next couple days and you’ll be able to see it [00:40:00] start to chase down kids.

We might do. Um, thank you Ann. Um. I’m not patient, so maybe you can gimme some of your patience. Um, so hopefully we can, you know, do other sessions like this. I’m happy to, uh, we’ve worked with NACA and the PA School Council Association in the past. They’ve been very ungenerous in using their time. Um, and happy to talk people through this, use this information.

We just, we all want more kids to complete fafsa. We all want more kids to go to college. Um, and with the money that’s out there now compared to where it was five years ago. We need to really encourage part clear, our low income students, that there, that higher education is for you and there is money there and they have to do this step first, either FAFSA or Mafa.

Um, just another note, we most likely will not do something like this for Mafa, um, for do students, mostly undocumented families, particularly because. The data is very sensitive, and particularly in this time, we wanna make sure that, you know, some of that’s gonna be worked, particularly if you’re working in a district.

A lot of students are undocumented of you chasing down those students [00:41:00] individually and talking to them about this. So just so you know, there’s a specific reason why that data tool has not been developed.

Jennifer Bento: So Great. Thank you now for sharing all this valuable information. Are there any, um, any lingering questions?

It doesn’t look like we have any questions coming in. Um, we’ll be, again, we’ll be sending out a follow-up email with the recording and the slides and that link, um, to the evidence of learning forum. Um, and just along the, um, FAFSA support events, um, we MEFA offers, um, we have a host of what we’re calling FAFSA festivals, so those are virtual events.

You can go on to MEFA.org/events. And sign up, register for those. Um, and also FAFSA Day Mass is a ALS also offering, uh, virtual events, and those are going through April. So you can go to fafsa day.org and uh, you know, you can point your, your students and families that need help with both the FAFSA and the masa.

So we have a couple of s [00:42:00] experts, um, joining us for those events that can help students with the mafa and also students that need help, um, or, uh, families, um, that. Our Spanish speaking. So just a little, a little plug for those events to help get students and families over the finish line with that. But this was, this was so great.

Thanks Nile.

Nyal Fuentes: Yeah, thanks everyone for coming. Happy holidays and thanks for all the work you’re doing. You know, get our kids ready for everything. Life, college and beyond, not beyond life, but you know what I’m saying? Yeah, that’s, that’s someone else’s work. Alright to you. Thank you.

Jennifer Bento: Okay. Have a great day everyone.