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Extrapolating FAFSA Completion
Explaining more of my forecasts on completion and enrollment drop
Phil Hill
June 20, 2024
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In Sunday’s ETCH newsletter from Matthew Tower (fyi - it’s a great weekly read if you have not already subscribed):
Phil Hill becomes the first industry analyst or publication I’ve seen estimate the enrollment impact of the new FAFSA rollout. Phil forecasts an enrollment drop of 5-10%, which would be a more substantial drop in enrollments than was triggered by COVID (and without a federal stimulus package to backstop university revenue declines).
The basis of this prediction was the post FAFSA Fiasco Die Is Cast and data extrapolation on completion data from NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker.
To get my estimate, I have taken these trends and extrapolated the curve to show it leveling out near the 10% level. I believe it is too late to avoid this leveling off.
I thought it might be useful to share a little more why I think (best case) the final FAFSA completion drop is 10%. Let’s start with the current data as of June 7th.
I think that Everett Rogers’ work in Diffusion of Innovations is still the best description of how changes diffuse across social groups, and one his core insights is that these adoptions tend to follow a sigmoid curve (aka the S-curve).