NC FAFSA Tracker

School-level FAFSA completion rates in the FAFSA Tracker are calculated using data from two public sources: Federal Student Aid (FSA), an office of the U.S. Department of Education, and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI).

• FAFSA completion rates are automatically calculated in the FAFSA Tracker for traditional and charter schools where senior count data is available from NCDPI Principal’s Month 2 report. CIHS and private schools can calculate their own FAFSA completion rates by dividing their current completions by their total senior class.

Graduating Total senior counts from grade 12 are from NCDPI’s Principal Monthly Report (PMR) Enrollment for Month 2 (for all public schools except CIHS). To ensure that the FAFSA Tracker is reporting consistent numbers from a single source, we are unable to make updates to this data point throughout the academic year; however, users can calculate the FAFSA completion rate by dividing completions by total senior count for their school.

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Federal Student Aid (FSA) provides information on total FAFSA submissions and completions by school on a weekly basis from October to June and bi-weekly thereafter.

NCDPI: The Tracker uses Membership Last Day (MLD) from the Principal’s Monthly Report Month 2 for senior class counts starting in January, and holds the senior class size steady throughout the remainder of the year.

Submitted means that the application was sent in but may not have all required portions completed or may have errors. If a FAFSA form is submitted but not complete, the student will receive an email from the Department of Education asking them to correct their FAFSA.

Completed means that an application was submitted and fully completed and is now being considered for financial aid.

A completed FAFSA is necessary to determine eligibility for federal and state student aid and is often used for other forms of financial aid, such as school-based aid.

Authorized users of CFNC’s Finish the FAFSA can see student-level data to determine which students have submitted, completed, or not started the FAFSA¹.

Importance of Signatures
A common error for a FAFSA that was “submitted but not completed” is a missing signature for either the parent or the student. Signatures may be completed electronically using the FSA ID. 

¹Due to the phased roll out of the 2024-2025 FAFSA, we don’t currently have data on completed FAFSAs; the FAFSA tracker only shows the number of submitted FAFSAs. As soon as that completion data is available from the Department of Education, we will update the FAFSA Tracker to reflect that data.

FAFSA completion data represent a subset of students the US Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid (FSA) office identified as “seniors” based on how these students answered questions in their FAFSA application. For example, students who answered they have attended college before may not be identified as high school seniors in the FSA data set and would therefore not be captured in the Tracker.

FSA makes certain assumptions to determine who is a high school senior:

• First-time filer
• No older than 19
• Will receive a high school diploma
• Will be considered a college freshman by the start of the school year to which they are applying for aid

That means the following students are not included in the high school data:

• Students who report (incorrectly or otherwise) that they will receive anything other than a high school diploma.
• Students who have filed a FAFSA in a previous cycle, regardless of whether they attended college.
• Students who report that they will be anything but an incoming first-year undergraduate.
• Students who are older than 19 years of age.
• Students who have earned a GED.

This is not a comprehensive list. You can find a complete list of data details and assumptions on the FAFSA completion website.

The following schools are not included in the FAFSA Tracker:

• Public schools with no enrollment data available.
• Schools with less than five (5) students who have submitted the FAFSA are listed in the Tracker as having 0 submissions. Once a school has more than 5 FAFSA submissions, their data will be included in the Tracker.

Note: The data in the Tracker comes directly from the U.S. Department of Education Federal Student Aid (FSA) weekly, and this data set has some school naming differences that can cause issues with the schools loading correctly in the Tracker.

If your school has more than five FAFSA submissions or completions, but you do not see the school listed in the FAFSA Tracker, please email fafsatracker@ncseaa.edu.

Data in the FAFSA Tracker and Finish the FAFSA report should be similar, but they may not be identical. There are several reasons why the Tracker may not match the report in Finish the FAFSA.

Data update on different schedules. Finish the FAFSA updates every business day, while the federal data used in the Tracker updates weekly October through June. The data that populates from the U.S. Department of Education Federal Student Aid, reflects FAFSA submissions and completions about one week prior to the release date, and this date is listed in the Tracker. Additionally, the Tracker typically updates on Mondays about 2 business days after the federal data release, on Fridays.

Data include different methods to identify high school seniors in the counts.

• Finish the FAFSA identifies all grade 12 and 13 students as potential seniors using a name match, which may lead to larger senior class sizes reported than those identified as seniors by FSA based on student answers in their FAFSA application.
• Finish the FAFSA is intended to help counselors assist specific seniors at their schools, rather than serve as a basis for comparison among schools. Therefore, the list of seniors in Finish the FAFSA is updated for the second semester to show any seniors at that school who were not there in the fall semester or to remove any who graduated. The senior count data used in the Tracker is from Month 2 enrollment rates, provided by NCDPI, and is not updated during the academic year.

Data have different privacy limitations. Even if a school has fewer than five (5) FAFSA filers, the authorized school-based users of Finish the FAFSA will see the FAFSA completion status for those students listed in the report. This is because data in the Finish the FAFSA is private and only available to authorized recipients. Data in the Tracker is public so is limited due to privacy.

Auto-calculations for FAFSA completion rate for CIHS in the Tracker are not listed because the total number of graduating seniors in these schools is not systematically categorized across all CIHS schools, which leads to FAFSA completion rates that may not be accurate. FAFSA completions are reported by FSA whether the students are enrolled in the 12th or 13th grade.

Data is presented for the current school year and last year for schools with at least five FAFSA completions.

Note: FAFSA completion rates for private schools cannot be calculated because we are unable to access senior enrollment data for private schools from a single source. Please divide the number of FAFSA completions by the number of graduating seniors for your school to estimate the FAFSA completion rate.