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

Julie Shields Rutyna: [00:00:00] All right. Good morning and welcome everyone. My name is Julie Shields and I’m the director of college planning education and training at MEFA. And, um, as you probably know, this is a MEFA Institute webinar, uh, which, um, the MEFA Institute is professional development for counselors and college access professionals.

And you can receive. Um, professional development points for attending this morning. So when you get your follow up, you’ll see the way to do that. And we’re so lucky to have Nile Fuentes from Jesse with us today. He is the college and career readiness Coordinator, and I. Assume that a lot of you know Nile, but if you don’t, um, you’ll be happy, uh, to be here with him this morning.

And he’s gonna talk with you about FAFSA completion reports and, um, a lot of things that you can do to help your students. So. What I would say is, um, if you have [00:01:00] questions, throw them in the q and a and I will monitor those and make sure I, I bring those up for Nile. And tomorrow, or sometimes these days, it’s the next day.

Um, after the webinar, we will send you the recording and send you the. So you’ll have those and you can share with colleagues. And um, this will be on our website, so if colleagues couldn’t come this morning, they can also, uh, watch it there after the fact. So with that, I will turn it over to you, Nile.

Nyal Fuentes: Uh, good morning everyone.

I hope everyone can hear me okay. Um, and again, as we go along, feel free to drop in questions. Um, or you can wait till the end either way. Um, I’m gonna, here’s the agenda for today. Again, I’m ententes, I introduce myself ’cause I don’t remember. I’m gonna do kinda some level setting at the beginning. I’m gonna talk about what FAFSA is.

I think most people know this piece a little about the increase in state financial aid. Um, a little bit of data review, and I have to say, some of the data is older, so I’m gonna [00:02:00] ask you to use this as what I call guidepost data. If you don’t know, um, something called AWS, which is the Amazon Web Services that basically runs this.

Um, the infra internet infrastructure of this country has been down for two days, so I wasn’t able to go in and, um, and enter new data into the updated data, and I apologize for that. I just waited till the last minute and that was a bad idea. Um. So I’ll show you kinda some, a little bit of dated data and as soon as AWS is up again, I will update the data and probably get the slides over to Julie so she can get ’em out to you.

Um, in the same way Edwin is down as well because of this outage. This is again, a nationwide outage and for once is not the state’s fault, um, but it is a pain in the neck. Um, so I’m gonna talk about that data a little bit, then I’m gonna dive into why you’re here, which is really about the fafsa, Edwin Reports, and then kind of a new thing that’s coming out, which is our.

FAFSA dashboard, which will be a publicly facing report that, you know, everyone in the world can see. And hopefully we’ll get to increase our, um, FAFSA completion. Again, the part of the big, bigger part [00:03:00] of this conversation is the idea is we want more kids going to college. We want more kids to be able to afford college, particularly our low income students.

And this is about providing opportunity and we are all about. Closing this opportunity gap, particularly for our historically marginalized populations. Um, so that’s what a lot of this conversation is about today. Today. And, you know, kind of why I am here in general, I tend to have a pretty vernacular speaking style, uh, for those that I, I don’t know if that’s the right word to use for it.

So if I say things like kids or use things like that, it’s not meant as an insult. It, it could be students. Um, generally I’m gonna be talking about high school seniors. Um, but certainly this might apply for some of your adult students as well. Um, the general conversation, not what’s in the FAFSA reports.

So with that being said, let’s head off into our adventure. Um, so a little bit here. Um, and this Go Hire thing is an initiative being started by our Department of Higher Education, our executive of Office of Education and Partnership, um, with our department, um, to increase the number of students, particularly historically marginalized students going [00:04:00] on to college.

Um, as you know, um, we’ve really seen a drop in en enrollment over the past decade or so. I’m certainly worsened by the 2020. Um. Uh, pandemic and going on, although the past couple years we see we’re seeing some slight increases in enrollment. I’ll show you some of those data in a second. Um, so we had this kind of peak in 2017.

Um, we had over 70% of our students going to college. Um, and then it’s again, been slowly decreasing, although the public higher Educ CHA system had in fall of 2024, that’s the latest data that I have had. Its second conte consecutive. Um, term of growth. And most of this was really driven by, um, the tuition free community college that was available to students.

So large growth, particularly in adult students going on to, um, you know, experience the tuition free community college. And again, as we say, we wanna talk about these college going grad gaps to continue exist for all of our historically marginalized populations, including black, [00:05:00] Latino, low income, um, English learners and students with disabilities.

Um, also, sorry, when talking to this, I am unabashedly a college going supporter just because I, I, I know there’s lots of opportunities for young people after high school, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be college. I’m on the side of let’s get as many kids the opportunity to go to college that we can, if they make a decision to go into the trades or the military or.

Whatever they decide to do, become a, you know, a mime and on the streets, whatever they decide to do, it’s great. I just wanna make sure that we’re really thinking about the opportunity that students have to go on to college. So what’s fafsa? Most of you know this, it’s a free application for federal student aid.

None of your kids should be paying extra money to fill out fafsa. We know that cost continues to be a barrier for, um, post-secondary education, even though we’ve made some re really recent moves in the past three years around affordability for low income students, the Commonwealth. Um, and this is particularly for low, uh, first generation college going students as a first co [00:06:00] generation college goer.

I feel this hard. I, you know, when I was a little kid, I think some of you heard me speak, I thought that people walked around in, um, caps and gowns all the time and, um, spoke Greek and Latin. I had no idea what college was. Turns out it’s not, uh, not many people are actually speaking Greek and Latin, but you know, a lot of kids still don’t know what college is all about outside of maybe seeing a movie or something.

Um, and it’s really one of the most important steps and it’s become, if any of you heard Julie talk in the past, it’s become a very fast. Um, system. I mean, I did my, my oldest daughter started college last year. Did fafsa. It took about seven minutes. I mean, my, my, you know, we have two or two income family with w twos and stuff, and, um, it was pretty easy for us.

It’s more difficult for other families, but, um, for a lot of families it’s become very easy to do. Um, talk a little about access and affordability. This is a big piece here. Uh, Massachusetts has been a big, made some big moves through, um, uh, the Healy DRIs [00:07:00] School administration and, and the last year’s, the Baker administration as well, uh, in providing some affordability, particularly for our low income students, including tuition and free community college mass grant, plus mass grant plus expansion.

The big secret, um. That a lot of low income families don’t know about. And of course, our tuition equity in Mafa, we will not be talking about MAA completions specifically in this session, although I know that Julie and um, Andre do a great presentation around, um, tuition equity and um, accessibility for students who are not eligible to apply for fafsa.

This slide, I did not get the FY 26 data. This is again, part of my problem and I didn’t even know I left this slide in. Um, but this is the idea. If you think about this, we have doubled the amount of state financial aid in. So this is not Pell, this is not federal student loans, but this is state money, mostly mass grant money that’s gone into increasing funding, particularly for low and middle income kits.

Um, so huge increases here and great opportunities. Um, talk, talking about [00:08:00] this, about tuition and fee free community college. Um, all students who do not yet have a degree are eligible to go to community college at no cost to themselves. Um, these are funded through and there’s, there’s no reason to really know the details of this, but it started out with this mass recon reconnect program, which is really talking.

Adult students having access. And um, then when it, once we expanded it to all students, um, it became Mass educate. So there’s two different funding streams here. I don’t think you need to really worry about that. If you have a parent who comes in who’s interested in tuition free community college, they have the same rights.

And, uh, privileges to go on to, um, community college and, and access it. This is a huge opportunity for students, um, around affordability for those students who said, I can’t afford it, and a lot of kids who, you know, kind of, um, Hey, I’m staying home. I’m not ready to go off to a four year. There’re great opportunities at community college.

I’m a community college graduate. I’m always gonna advocate community college. And I also say that community college is hard. ’cause you need to have a lot [00:09:00] of, um, you know, a lot of times you’re going and you’re isolated and you’re doing your own thing. You go home. It’s a, it’s harder than being amongst all college students, but it is a great opportunity for a lot of our kids.

And adults. Um, just a little bit about free community quote, quote, free community college, and I don’t really like that term that much. It is a last dollar grant program, which means they’re gonna take up your pells and your mass grant and all that stuff before they finish off paying off your tuition and fees.

So it’s just not a reminder. You just, you know, don’t just show up on campus and expect to, you know, start classes right. Then. I think it’s important to, um. Really inform students and families about that. Um, but there is, you know, an opportunity for a book and supply allowance, et cetera. Um, and these are for full and for part-time students.

So this is, this is a great opportunity for kids. Um, Cape Cod Community College is kind of where I got my start in higher education. So I always like to, you know, rep them a little bit. There’s some pictures of some students there. Next, really talking about our four years, and this is the expansion of Mass Grant [00:10:00] Plus.

Um, and this means if you think about a student who’s Pell eligible, it’s basically tuition and fee free at our four year institutions and UMass. So, um, all of our nine state colleges, plus Star State universities, plus all UMass campuses, this is a great opportunity for low income students. There’s also, through mass grants, some support for students who.

Are low middle income students as well. And again, looking at this, really make, make sure that none of this is available to any students unless they have done FAFSA and Masa. So that’s important to note for all your students. You can’t just show up on the campus and expect to go there for free. Um, also this generally does not cover room and board for those students who are gonna be, you know, not gonna be commuter students.

UMass is mostly commuter school. UMass Boston is mostly a commuter school, but not all. Um, so it’s just important for really, um, think about that and, you know, really inform your students about what their opportunities and responsibilities are to, um, avail themselves of these financial [00:11:00] opportunities. A little bit more here that talks a little about the low middle income students.

Um, you know, depending on what their SAI is. And again, that is something that needs to come outta fast or mafa, um, and get that piece done. Any questions on these kind of, on those kind of two pieces there? Uh, I’ll, I’ll, I have some links at the end of this that really go into a lot more explanation. Uh, our friends at, um, the Office of Students Financial Assistance at the Department of Higher Education can be super helpful in this.

And there are some links again to information about that. Also important, I’m not gonna rely of detail this, there’s people who know a lot more about this. The tuition equity law, despite recent changes, is still in effect for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Um, and these for certain students, and again, these students are not, you know, it’s, it’s not for newcomer students.

These are students who have had to live here for three years. These are for students who have kind of lived here for a while. Um, there are high school completers and allows them to, um, receive. Um, create, fill out [00:12:00] this master form and, um, be eligible for in-state tuition, which is very recent, um, past three again, past three years, and allows them to apply for need-based state financial aid.

So again, for Mass Grant plus and for their, um, tuition free community college, for example. Um, there’s a little bit about, and again, links here about the tuition equity law. Um, for those students who, um, you are supporting who are, you know, might not be eligible to all the fafsa, it is a process, um, you’ll probably need to walk through that with them, particularly for those students whose families are limited English proficient, and, um, kids that are English learners, to kind of get through this process and understand that.

And more about this, just, you know, the FAFSA and mafa are very similar. Um, and it’s available in two languages at this point, but I don’t think Julie can correct me on this. I don’t think Mafa is up yet. I think they need to get, um, the FAFSA forms and mimic them before they get, um, put out officially.

Julie Shields Rutyna: So, yeah, the mass [00:13:00] mafa is not out yet, is that what you said?

Nyal Fuentes: Yeah, yeah,

Julie Shields Rutyna: yeah, exactly.

Nyal Fuentes: So keep your eye out and of course we’ll send, we’ll send out information to everybody when it’s available. All right. I am gonna jump into some data here, a little bit of switch. That’s again, that’s about our state financial aid opportunities. I know you’re not necessarily here for part of the conversation, but gimme a couple minutes to talk a a little about data.

Here’s kinda why we do this. We don’t do FAFSA for an exercise and filling out forms. We want more kids to go to college. Uh. I wanna talk a little bit about here, about the drop in college. Going again, I apologize. I do have 2024 data. I just couldn’t get to it because of the, the, um, nationwide outage. Um, but you can kind of see here the drop that I was talking about in college attendance between 2017, which was kind of our apex.

And now, um, I think one of our biggest concerns is looking at, say, our Latino population. I’ll show you another slide that’s other student groups that are not racial ethnic in second. Um, if you look at really here, the Latino, dr, uh, the Latino College going rate. And again, this is immediate. This is means they graduate in in, in [00:14:00] June and they attend college in September.

We have numbers that are 16 months after, et cetera. But this is immediate. I just use this ’cause it’s cleaner. Um, and you can kind of see this drop here of 15 percentage points for Hispanic Latino students. And when you have a real large increasing population of Latino students in the Commonwealth, it really means that even though we’ve had this huge increase, we have actually fewer students, numbers wise, going on to college immediately, which is kind of nuts.

Um, so anyway, look at these numbers. We’ve seen drops pretty much across the board and our racial ethnic groups and in our aggregate, but particularly for our Latino and um, Hispanic students. Similarly for other, and again, these are college growing, um, numbers you can kinda see for low income students, there’s really significant drop in college going, um, huge drop in English learner college going here, um, which sort of surprised me.

You might say. A little bit of bounce back with the tuition free community college here. In the next couple years, but that’s something we’re really watching and the continuing drops [00:15:00] between boys and girls attending college, college here. Um, it’s really crazy and if you further just aggregated this, you’re a real nerd like me and look at say, low income men, the gap between low income white men and low income and not low income white men.

It’s very large. So in general, low income students are not going to college, and they’re frankly the people who can benefit the most from, uh, these recent changes in financial aid. So that’s a little about the college going piece. Here’s a little bit of FAFSA piece. Again, this is older data, but you know, this FAFSA completion data kind of aligns with, um, what we’ve seen in the college going drop.

So obviously if you’re not going to college, you’re probably not doing fafsa, but you see drops kinda around the horn here. Um, there’s been some ups and downs through, um, COVID, et cetera. 2018 is the earliest data we have. That’s why I didn’t match it with the 2017, but. You can kinda see here these drops and these [00:16:00] huge gaps in, um, FAFSA completion.

Similarly for, um, FAFSA completion for, um, by other student groups. And you can kind of really see this, this, you know, again, this huge gap in the small number of low-income students outta completing fafsa. In fact, in 2024, um, low income students completed FAFSA at a rate 26 percentage points below non low income.

That’s enormous. Um, and again, not having students, you know, in college, kind of breaking that cycle of poverty and, um, having access to these great financial aid opportunities is, is one of our challenges. A little bit more here, I kind of did it a little bit more of a disaggregation. Again, I pulled this from the tool that, um, you, you’ll be able to see once, um, once it’s up in a, in a week or so, hopefully.

Um, you can kinda see here this is what I was a little bit, I was talking about between the gaps between men and women and low income students. Um, when I kind of do a little bit more of a cross tab between what those look like. [00:17:00] Again, we’ll send you these slides so you can take a look, but I’ll probably update ’em with the new data and then send ’em on to Julia, send them on to you.

Any questions on those data before I kind of start really jumping into what you’re all here for? Take a pregnant pause, take a sip of my seltzer.

Julie Shields Rutyna: I don’t see any questions at the moment.

Nyal Fuentes: I’m either really boring or really perfect or somewhere in really

Julie Shields Rutyna: perfect. Alright.

Nyal Fuentes: Um, so again, you know, this is in, you know, in, in a world of bad news.

Let’s look at some good news. The FAFSA window did open early, um, late September. Again, the past couple years have been, um, disaster and then borderline disaster. As far as you know, the timing for the FAFSA window, it is open. People are getting it done fast, fast. We’re hearing, um, anecdotally, um, we are, again, we’re not seeing any of the data in our mass aid file, which we need to run the tool that I’m just about to show you, but it is being completed, [00:18:00] so that’s good news.

Um, now getting into what the Edwin FAFSA tool is. Okay, you ready? There are two FAFSA reports that will shortly be available for districts. And high schools in Edwin Analytics. So you need access. I’m gonna go over this in a second. This is just the overview to Edwin Analytics. I cannot give you permissions to that.

You can go through the security portal, which I’ll show you in a second, and you need to get permissions from that, from someone in your district. Um, on our website, there are lists of who your Edward Analytics coordinator is. It’s usually, but not always the same person who kind of does your SIMS and other state and federal reporting around data.

They can give you access and it’s up to you what level of access they give you. Um, the best level, if you are a school counselor in this room and you have access to other student level data. You’ll, you’ll, you should really, um, ask them for what’s called adminis administrator level. I know that sounds like your administrator, I know you’re not.

But that allows you to look at student level information and that’ll allow you to look at reports that list individual students. [00:19:00] Um, so these reports are compiled from fafsa. Data we get from US Department of Education are. Whatever the hell it is now, it might be in, um, over in commerce. I have no idea where the data is, is actually living now, but let’s pretend it’s US Department of Education for this moment and we match it.

It comes through Massachusetts Department of Education and we match it through things like sims, which is dis information that you report from, um, your district about the kids you have technically. It’s what’s in called, what’s called a claim to file, which means those are the kids that are in front of you right now.

Most of our, what are called our Sims files use enrollment data that as of October 1st in these reports, it is the, it is the report that uses data that your district says those kids are in front of you today. Um, and that’s important because you’re not gonna see, you know, a perfect match between October data and the kids that are what is called claimed.

Um, the information is dynamic. Usually it will be updated several times a week. And again, it’s again, [00:20:00] only the students that you report. And access to this. This is, um. Is determined by a school district I mentioned, but please, if you’re a school counselor, get access to student level data. I implore you to do that.

It just helps you to actually chase down. The point of this is not to, you know, put a headline of data, but to really have you be able to chase down kids who have yet to complete fafsa. Um, I put up a kind of, it’s not an FAQ, but it’s kind of a user’s guide on our website. If you really want to, you know, look at this and you know, hand it to someone in administration, this is what I’m doing and this is why I’m doing it.

I think that’s a great tool to do that. Um, this is Edwin logging into Edwin. It’s actually a screenshot of Edwin out. Obviously, you need to go into the security portal first. A lot of you have EA, it is generally a different sign in, but it looks very similar, so you have a different sign into here. You’ll log into your account.

There’s a multifactor identification that sends you an email, so you can sign in, you enter the code, and you click on what’s called n Android Analytics. Once you’re in there. [00:21:00] Um, you’ll get to this Edwin homepage. There is so much information on Edwin. It’s crazy. A lot of the information I showed you about college access, you can access those reports for your, um, for your own school as well.

So if you wanted to see if you are an Abby Kelly. Charter school, which is the first one in the alphabet. And I know more about this school than I probably should, just ’cause it’s the first in the alphabet. You can click on your school and you can see all information about where your kids went to college, et cetera, et cetera.

All sorts of different reports in here. A lot of people use this for MCA, but this is really about, this is about, um, FAFSA right now, but it’s the same kind of entry point. Important. I, I know it’s silly to have a slide for this, but this is. Probably an, you know, a quarter of our calls and emails are like, I can’t see the reports.

Um, you have to hit this little green button in the right hand corner. So once you’ve done your filters and stuff and chosen what you need, you need to hit view report to get to, um, to see the actual report. And when you see it, again, you can’t look at it [00:22:00] now because it’s down, but you can, um, you’ll be able to see what I’m talking about.

Um, in Fab Edwin, we have end two different reports. We have a district and school view that is an aggregate view. Everyone can look at that. Um, it technically it’s public information, um, and it gives you an idea of, uh, who’s completed and, and who has not. And then there’s a student level report, and this is the creme de la creme.

This is what you’re really gonna use to chase down your kis that have yet to complete fafsa. It’s updated regularly. Um, oops. It’s actually when choosing award year, it’ll be 26, 27. So I’m gonna change that before I send it to you. Um, we have a little bit about a week lag time between students actually completing, sometimes less, and it’s showing up once the data starts rolling.

It’s been as little as three days that we’ve seen, and in here you’ll see a student, um, identified as submitted or not found. Within submitted, there’s, I’m gonna go over this in a second. It’s complete or incomplete. Incomplete usually means that they haven’t put in a signature, they’re [00:23:00] missing some information, a social security number or whatever, which means they press submit, but it’s not yet been accepted.

Um, and I’m gonna go over submitted and not found it in a second as well. Um. Again, we using, uh, what’s claimed by the school or district and matching it, and there’s three different ways it’s gonna show up. This is a little more detail. Complete means you are all set, that data is rolling off to the school.

Um, wherever you’re sending it to it, you’re good to go. Incomplete. It means they submitted again, but they’re missing some elements and the student or family should really follow up. If you’re, if they allow you to look over their shoulder, that’s fine, but that’s really on the student or family to kind of figure that piece out.

Then there’s not found. Not found usually means that that student has not completed FAFSA in a small percentage and in big schools, a small percentage can be a large number in bigger schools. Um, it it might mean that we could not match the data that was submitted by schools, meaning sims or claim data and what comes from the fafsa.

[00:24:00] Ordinarily this comes from, um. A student’s name being different in Sims versus what they printed to the feds. You’ll have a lot of students, and particularly with Asian and Latino students who have different names that is, that are on their official documentation versus what they put into the school of district when they registered.

There’s nothing, you know nefarious about this. And a lot of Latino naming convention, if many of you have seen it, uses something called the, it uses the maternal and the paternal name, so it uses the Fuentes in my case. Um, you know, it’s like they use this a different naming convention, which will not allow us to do the match.

There’s also some schools, or they might just mi you know, a lot of Asian students might have their given Asian name and they might have adopted a name like Mary or Lisa or something just for the ease of, um, English speakers or perceived. Um, I’m not making, I’m not making a social commentary on this, but just like the ease of English speakers to understand their names and.

There’ll be different names here, so we [00:25:00] aren’t able to do that match or in many cases it’s also, um, the, the birth, the date of birth. There’s limited things we can match on because they have social security numbers. We have sas, we do not have social security numbers. We don’t want social security numbers.

That would be the perfect way to match. We just don’t want that in our data system. It creates all sorts of different issues around data security. So a lot of times they’ll switch the month and day if you’re using a European dating conventions and it’s kinda hard to do those matches. I’m gonna talk about in a second how you can find those kids that are unmatched, but just so you know, they’re gonna show up as not found in in the data tool.

Um, this is what the 3 0 7 looks like again, for this year. Seniors. It’s confusing ’cause under award year it’s gonna be 26, 27. What the feds do when they report out FAFSA completion is they do it on the anticipated college going year of that student. In this 3 0 7 report, again, I, I just showed the statewide one.

You’ll see my friend Abby Kelly down here, followed by Abington. [00:26:00] Um, you’ll kinda see the different columns here. So the number of 12th grade and sp and in this, again, we’re using students, SP means those students are who are students with disabilities that are still enrolled in your high school. And those students might be in outta district placements, but they’re still put on the record as being at your high school.

Um. But, um, they, they’re ungraded. They’re not in a particular grade. They’re usually students who are staying there at 22 for the most part. Um, and I’ll show you kind of, we added a different, um, filter on this if you didn’t wanna see all those students. But we felt, um, strongly from an equity point of view, even though very few of those SB students actually complete fafsa, that we should show all these data for your students.

’cause they are students that are under your tutelage care, et cetera, leadership, um, in post-secondary. Um, outcomes. So you’ll see here the numbers might like look a little lower than you anticipated because of those students that are in there. They’re probably like 1% to 1.5% of students are students, um, who are designated [00:27:00] as sp.

You’ll see again the number who have submitted and the number complete and the number incomplete and the number not found. And again, not found is usually students have not completed fafsa, but sometimes the student couldn’t match. So that’s the aggregate. It’s great to know, this is kind of the scoreboard.

It allows you to set targets, et cetera. Think about your district and school strategies, et cetera. Um, the more imp, whoops. And here’s another one here. Um, I used Worcester ’cause they have multiple high schools you can kinda look at if you’re a district of multiple high schools, all your high schools, anytime you see one of these blue links and you have the correct level of access, you can click on this blue link and you can get to our, our student level report.

Oops. So this is what the student level report looks like. This again, obviously, I. Took out all the identifiable data in this. This is real. But otherwise, this would be real data from last year. Um, and you can kind of see going across, um, name, et cetera, et cetera. The sa, again, if you see the SA [00:28:00] there, the SAS will also be a blue link.

If you hit that blue link where it says sa, if you can see that and have access, you can actually get to a student profile report. Which is called the PR 600, which basically has all the data that you report to the state. Are we, are we data, et cetera, attendance, data, everything about that individual student, not just related to FAFSA or college going, but everything kind of about that student that you report to the state.

It’s a great tool if you’re kind of trying to remember, ah, what’s this kid all about? And like you can just click on that and like, oh yeah, yeah, I can remember what the student is. We put a lot of information here too about race and gender, low income, et cetera. I think this allows you to really kind of set goals and make sure you’re targeting, um, populations and you have, you know, have equity in mind when you’re doing this type of work.

Um, for students who have completed fafsa, you’ll see a completion date there. Um, and that could be all over the place. Um. These dates are a little bit, you know, okay, here’s some students that were actually completing and still August. But you can kinda see what the date [00:29:00] there is and, um, and the yes no, sometimes it’s easier to filter and then complete, and complete, et cetera.

So this is kind of what you see here. It’s the most valuable tool you’re gonna have that I’m gonna show you today. So really encourage you to really, once this opens up, to really take a look at that and use that a little bit closer. Look here. Um. Little bit focused. Again, the blue link is a hyperlink.

This is obviously fake data here. Um, but allows you to look at, um, the information, um, about what that student and what that student looks like, et cetera. Remember that some of these students that are not found are gonna be found in an, they just were not available in our matching algorithm. Um, when you, once you, I add this slide in ’cause I think I, I always forget to show people this, one of the beauties of these reports is it, it’s nice to look at something in a screen, et cetera.

There’s an export function on this. So when you’re looking at that list of students, and it might be hundreds. I’ve seniors in your, in, in sp students in your school, you can export it to any one of [00:30:00] these things. I don’t know why you’d wanna study the PowerPoint, but May, but you can. But Excel tends to be the best place to go.

And Excel is great because you can do those filters, you can do that sorting and really target students. I, I would even say add a column. So if you have. Four school counselors working on this. You could kind of divide them up and kind of, you know, we’ll chase down these kids. If you’re working with a trio program like Gear Up, et cetera, kind of hand this off and say, Hey, here’s the kids we’re really thinking about, and I know these are your kids.

Let’s go attack this and really be strategic and tactical about how we’re gonna get kids to uncomplete fafsa. The beauty about the Excel sheet is it will create two different tabs. One will be those matched students and one is these unmatched students. I’ll talk about that in a second, but it’s a great way to look at, um, the students who are completing faft are not completing fast school.

Also, a new feature this year allows you to select the grade. So again, the, in these files it should only be 12th graders and SP students. Most [00:31:00] USP students and a lot of schools are going to outta district placements. So if you were looking, if you’re working with the out district place, I just wanna choose my SP kids and see where they are so I can go to, you know, when I’m working with my, um, 7 66 school that we did now district placement school with, we can kind of attack those kids and, or just look at my 12th graders, ’cause the kids that are right in front of me right now.

So this is a great way to kind of make the numbers, um, more targeted. Um, in this file when you download an Excel. You’ll be able to see this matched and unmatched. Unmatched, unmatched students are students who said they went to their high school and their fafsa, but we don’t do a MA match. For a lot of times those students might have dropped out.

They might be an adult program or something like that, but they just put the high school they last went to. Um, even though they’re not necessarily supposed to, um, a lot of times students in your unmatched will also be students and probably the majority of them, maybe, um, whose names are different, um, [00:32:00] whose, uh, other information is incorrect.

Um, and that we couldn’t do a match. So look at this unmatched file before you panic. And Janie has said, yeah, I did fafsa. I’m sure I did look at this unmatched list to see if we find them. There’s no way of us changing the data in our system. There’s 70,000 kids. But, or 76,000 kids or so. Um, but it is for your local records.

You can kind of check them off if you see them in the non matched file. But sometimes you’re gonna see kids in a unmatched file that again, aren’t your student anymore, but just say they are. Or they might be going to private school and they just put you as a school or whatever. So, um, there’s no need to panic about the non match.

But a lot of times you’re gonna find kids that are in your school who have completed fafsa. Again, kind of recovering this. Alex said they did fafsa, they might be in the unmatched. Um, and uh, really thinking about download’s X files on Excel files so you can look at it and then there’s no way address to really fix those.

A lot of people have kind of yelled at me over the [00:33:00] past few years, like, why can’t you fix this? And like, I don’t know, Mary Chong and Alday Chong are different people according to our system. I can’t go in and change out who they are. That’s an actual case actually. But I changed names slightly. Um, so anyway, that’s kind of what the FAFSA tool looks like in the majority of our presentation.

I’m gonna go into something else before I go into the FAFSA dashboard and confuse people. I’d like to take any questions or thoughts if anyone, um, has any.

Julie Shields Rutyna: Um, let’s see. Um, one question. Should outplacement schools put their home district or the 7 6 6 schools?

Nyal Fuentes: We’re just pulling this from Sims. So, um, as far as the reporting. That’s a good question. We’re just pulling from sim so I don’t know what they should actually put in fafsa. [00:34:00] I wouldn’t worry about it as long as we’re thinking about those kids.

Again, the number of SB students who actually do FAFSA is very low, like in the, in double digits outta the thousands of students there are. Um, but I would just not mess with FAFSA that much. ’cause it has, I’m sorry, with sims that much. ’cause that has to do with like funding and things like that and not mess with that.

Um, I would just do probably what is most convenient for you. Okay. Oh, one other question, just going back.

Julie Shields Rutyna: I actually responded to it by, um, over email, over, you know, the question section by giving Stephanie Barbosa email, but I’ll just ask if you had any thoughts about it. Um, let me just see what it was.

Um, for Mafa, do students need to complete three full years of high school and mass? Or just be enrolled in three school years. In other words, can they enroll in the middle of grade 10? And I just didn’t [00:35:00] know if you had any more detailed thoughts.

Nyal Fuentes: I think it’s three enrolled three years, but I would go with Stephanie on this.

Yeah, she’s, um, Stephanie, um, Barbosa works at offices, student financial assistance at DHE and she’s fabulous. Yes. And the authority on all things on Mafa, so I always defer to her on those questions just to be sure.

Julie Shields Rutyna: Perfect. I put her email there and she Oh, cool. Is happy to take the questions. So good.

Thank you. She’s,

Nyal Fuentes: she’s fabulous. They’re fabulous over there.

Julie Shields Rutyna: Thanks, Nile.

Nyal Fuentes: All good. Um, and again, I’m gonna, when we get the presentation, I’ll put it in the, in the, oh, this is just the hosting panels. Can I send it to everyone? I, I’ll, I, I’ll, I’ll show you what our email is. The easy to remember email ’cause either Kate or my colleague Kate, or I can answer it around the fast tool.

Again. Again, you’re gonna go into Edward Analytics. It’s not gonna be there because AWS is down. So hopefully next week take a look. Let me know. We can, you know, redo this at some point, ask questions and get that piece. [00:36:00] So that’s the FAFSA tool. I do wanna talk to you about something else that’s coming up, um, that’s gonna be more public facing and outside of the security portal.

And that’s the FAFSA dashboard. So this FAFSA dashboard, we’re thinking it’s probably gonna be, it’s gonna start in December, um, once we get Sims data, um, finalized. Uh, and this dashboard will really provide frequent public updates around FAFSA completion by school district and student group. So again, everybody can look at this.

Your school committee will see this, the newspaper, my mom, whoever wants to look at students. Um, and on the other side. People advocating college access and other people advocating for FASTA completion will really be able to look at this. The intent is really to increase FASTA completion. Um, there’s a couple different reports that have come out of, um, our various educational agencies to really think about this lowfat completion college enrollment issue, um, including the air.

There’s an a, there’s a group called A Care that was really trying to increase exposure and access to higher education, plus a joint [00:37:00] fast resolution of, um, both of our boards. To kind of govern our work to set completion goals and really track and leverage existing par partnerships and also use the target, our communications, and any resources that we have to communities and populations that have low FAFSA completion.

So that’s kind of the why. What it is. Wow. This is quite a sentence, Nile. Um, I’ll fix this. So this is, this is a kind of joint agent co collaboration and any complicated bureaucracies. This, these things take time. It’s using the same data source you we’re using for these Sasa reports. Um, but we’re gonna be start saving the data every couple weeks.

So every couple weeks we’ll present, um, kind of updated data in this dashboard starting in December. Um. And, and going forward, be able to look year to year. So we’ll be able to look at on March 1st, 2026. It was this on March 1st, 2027. It was that, to kinda see how we’re doing, what progress it is again, available at state school district and selected [00:38:00] student groups.

This visualization’s a little bit different. We are gonna use, um, students that were enrolled, that were seniors as of October 1st. Um, the reason we’re doing this is it really provides some stability. The reports that are in Edwin will always be dynamic. There will always be all those students that are in front of you.

This one visualization is gonna really focus on. Kids that are 12th graders as October 1st, which are kind of what we use for official enrollments for all things. So the numbers are actually gonna look a little bit higher. We’re not, we’re not playing games here. We’re just trying to have a stable population that is not reality, to kind of provide some guideposts.

This is not part of the accountability system, anything like that. It’s not meant to shame districts really is about to get resources and get us kind of moving on what it looks like around FAFSA completion. Probably gonna be available in December, um, as sims, which is what districts report to us as far as enrollments go, I think it’s gonna be kind of cool.

We’re gonna show statewide overview district and school overview, kind of [00:39:00] big movers. So big movers are people who say, Hey, in the past month, Chelsea has increased this many students and stuff like that. High flyers. So people have very high fasting completion rates. Um, and then kind of trends year to year, which we’ll have moving forward.

And there’s all this other supplemental stuff that will be there, like explanations of the data and that type of thing. Um, I, I, I pull out a couple of slides as these aren’t all of them, but this is basically what it might look like. This is a statewide, this is not real data, so don’t pay attention to it.

Um, but this is kind of, we’re gonna try to show all these different student groups here. We’ve also decided that we’re gonna show non low income, low income. I think those data are very powerful. Um, is obviously a fake data because that wouldn’t be that. But, um, it gives you kind of an idea of looking at your, at the state and saying, how are we doing as far as really targeting, um, our student groups.

Um, and similarly there’s more that’s gonna be in here, but this is kind of what a district or [00:40:00] school report will look like. Um, and again, it will be a breakdown. It will list, this is Newton again, fake data. Um, it will list the whole district plus the, you know, different high schools in your district. And then a breakdown of all the different student groups.

’cause we really wanna focus on, um, closing our opportunity gaps for, um, historically marginalized populations. So it’s gonna be pretty cool against be publicly facing. I don’t want people to panic. Um. But it’s, you know, kind of our idea of being very democratic about using all of our data and presenting and very transparent parent and really targeting areas that we need to target.

’cause this is, you know, going to college to me, and I think to a lot of you that are in this room is very important. To us, it, you know, it helps to create the break cycles of poverty. It creates, um, you know, a stronger, you know, it creates having more students and of color and poorer students, um, having access to a greater opportunity in the economy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So that’s gonna be coming soon. Um, that’s kind of the end of what I’m doing here today. [00:41:00] Uh, thank you for, um, listening to me blather on for the last 45 minutes. Um, here’s the easiest email to remember. [email protected]. I know it says ewis, but we do other things too. Um, and that will make sure that Kate Sandal or myself, who kind of are.

Leading a lot of these data work around FAFSA can get that information to the right people. Um, that’s the second part is the access to the FAFSA tool. Ex, uh, explains thing. That’s not to get to the tool itself, this is to explain what’s in the tool. And again, I think this is a really great link to use if you’re trying to explain to your principal or your superintendent of why you want this.

Uh, a little bit about the Go Hire campaign. I didn’t talk a lot about that. I think there’ll be more coming out. This is some branding coming from the Commonwealth around the idea of it. Um, attending higher education. The best part about that page so far, it’s kind of nascent, is that it has links to kind of the, um, mass grant stuff and, um, mass grant expansion, plus the free community college.

Great. Links to there, plus links to where Mafa will be and to the FAFSA and these folks at DHE, you know, [00:42:00] um. All the folks over there can be super helpful in answering really detailed questions that I can’t answer. I’m, you know, I’m a K 12 person. I, I, I’ve pretty much expressed the limits of my knowledge of the financial aid, um, system in the past half hour or so.

Um, so this is kind of, uh, what I have for you today. Um, again, feel free to email me here. I’ll stay around for a while for questions. I really appreciate you, um, listening to me today.

Julie Shields Rutyna: Thank you so much Nile. And um, yeah, I’ll just wait a moment. Does anyone have any questions before we move on with our days?

This will be the best part of our day, day Nile? Maybe not. Maybe not. No,

I don’t see any more questions. Right. I know counselors get, they get busy by nine 15. Right.

Nyal Fuentes: Oh, well, let me just

Julie Shields Rutyna: see.

Nyal Fuentes: No, I, I see that too. It’s just Jennifer being nice. [00:43:00] Thank you, Jennifer. Great.

Julie Shields Rutyna: Well thank you all for joining. Thank you Nile. And, um, we will send the recording and the slides to you very soon.

Nyal Fuentes: Great. And feel free to email me that if you’re too embarrassed to, um, talk out loud, feel free to email, let Ewis address and I’ll check it and get back to you.

Julie Shields Rutyna: That’s great.

Nyal Fuentes: All right.

Julie Shields Rutyna: Thanks everyone. Have

Nyal Fuentes: a good day.