Good afternoon. Welcome to April’s edition of Beyond High School.

Colorado lawmakers used a portion of the state’s pandemic relief funds to pilot federal student aid form completion programs in 11 high schools in six districts. Fund My Future, which has federal funding through June, requires students to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid before graduation with districts’ support.

These pilot programs were designed to inform Colorado policymakers about how well a statewide universal FAFSA completion policy could work, especially because students leave tens of millions of federal money on the table each year to pay for college.

The grants have shown promise, and national advocacy groups have taken notice.

For example, a 2025 state report shows Adams City High School increased FAFSA completion by 20 percentage points from the 2021-22 to the 2022-23 school year, or from 42% to 62%. But fstudent completion dropped to 37% in 2023-24 after the rollout of the new Better FAFSA was marred by technical bugs, delays, and calculation errors.

Despite the challenges, most participating schools’ FAFSA numbers increased in the 2024-25 school year when there were fewer issues. Adams City High School’s completion rate increased to 44% that year.

At the same time, national data does show more students are completing the financial aid form now that the federal government has fixed the problems with the Better FAFSA.

In a recent report, national nonprofit The Education Trust compiled lessons from Colorado and three other states to understand how to make these policies work best. One best practice included ensuring school personnel have information on where individual students are in the FAFSA completion process. (Colorado has defunded its tool that allows counselors to track individual student FAFSA completion.)

Researchers also said money is a key factor, even if it’s not included in their report. Fund My Future data shows student support in schools varied widely, from $75 to $750 per student.

Some states have done this work without more funding for schools, said Victoria Jackson, an Education Trust higher education policy assistant director. But she said scaling any universal FAFSA completion policy should come with a consideration of increased state support to provide more school counselors and the tools to support students.

That’s a difficult proposal in Colorado, where there have been budget shortfalls of over $1 billion in each of the last two years.

“If there's some way that Colorado can find and raise revenue in the budget to support something like this, that would be great,” Jackson said.

Thank you for reading. Reach me at [email protected].

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