Admitted students to the Class of 2028 will have until May 15 to decide whether to enroll, the College announced on Feb. 10. The College postponed the deadline due to complications with the rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for the 2024-2025 academic year. The issues will not impact financial aid awards for current students, Director of Student Financial Services Ashley Bianchi and Dean of Admission and Student Financial Services Liz Creighton ’01 wrote in a joint statement to the Record. They confirmed that aid awards would be released in May as usual.
“The FAFSA has always been a secondary form for Williams since we do not use it to calculate need for Williams scholarships and grants,” Bianchi explained in an additional email to the Record. For students who still choose to fill out the FAFSA, “We will work with them to complete the FAFSA later this spring and summer when more of the kinks have been worked out,” Bianchi and Creighton wrote. “If/when a student qualifies for other sources of grant like federal and state financial aid, we will adjust their Williams grant to accommodate the new award.”
The College will use information from the College Scholarship Service (CSS) Profile, a different form administered by the College Board also intended for calculating financial aid awards. The College has always used the CSS Profile to determine family contribution, Bianchi and Creighton noted, so that the financial aid awards released to students in May will be unchanged.
The FAFSA is a form provided by the Department of Education that colleges typically use to calculate financial aid eligibility. Students seeking aid are typically required to fill out the form each academic year. This year, however, the application underwent significant changes intended to make it more accessible to students and increase access to federal funding. Updated features include an updated formula for calculating need amounts, fewer and simpler questions about family income, availability in more languages, and the option to send an application to more institutions.
Some students at the College described frustration with the old FAFSA form. “My past experiences with FAFSA have been negative to say the least,” Low Income Student Association (LISA) co-president Alexandra Riggs ’26 wrote in an email to the Record. “I have spent countless hours of my life that I will never get back, filling out the forms, dealing with technical issues on the website, resubmitting forms, and on the phone with FAFSA representatives… I fill out the form entirely myself each year and have had to teach myself how to read tax returns to input my parents’ information.”
“I am very happy to hear that FAFSA will be simplifying its form, increasing accessibility, and hopefully decreasing confusion and stress,” Riggs added. “This change will make it much easier for low- income students to enter their information without having to flip through 100+ questions. In addition, the increased opportunities for federal aid will have a great impact on students who depend on financial aid for their education.”
LISA board member Ry Emmert ’26 wrote in an email to the Record that the changes made the FAFSA easier for her to fill out this year. However, she recalled her initial anxiety after first learning about its updated form.
“Because FAFSA provided little information about the changes initially … I immediately feared that my financial aid offer would lessen as a result of the changes,” she wrote.
Riggs said that she was relieved to learn that current students were not required to fill out the FAFSA. “It was refreshing having to do one less lengthy form,” she wrote. “The CSS profile alone is time intensive, and the FAFSA has just added to my stress in past years.”
As a result of the redesign, the form was not available until Jan. 1, a significant delay from its typical rollout in October of the preceding year. The early weeks of its release were also marred by technical glitches, according to a report on the Department of Education’s website that lists dozens of problems, many still unresolved. In November 2023, the Department also acknowledged in a statement that the updates meant that colleges would receive student data weeks later than is typical.
“In summer 2023, in anticipation of a challenging roll out of the new FAFSA, we made the preemptive decision not to require the FAFSA from Class of 2028 families applying for financial aid,” Bianchi and Creighton wrote.
The Office of Admissions and Financial Aid began to consider pushing back the typical May 1 enrollment deadline once the reality of FAFSA delays became clear, Bianchi and Creighton wrote. The office is coordinating with other College offices to ensure that spring and summer deadlines for incoming first year students will be pushed back accordingly.
“We’ve heard from just a small number of admitted students who are grateful to have received a finalized financial aid award from Williams, but are still awaiting their financial aid offers from other schools,” they wrote. “The financial aid delays elsewhere can be stressful for students and families, and they’ve expressed gratitude for having until May 15 to let us know about their enrollment plans.”
Both Emmert and Riggs said that the College’s financial aid program was a major factor in their decision to attend. “Transparently, I decided to attend Williams because of its outstanding financial aid award,” Emmert wrote. “Had there been the possibility of my financial aid award being delayed, I would not have been able to apply early decision to Williams.”
