Posted Date: November 06, 2008
Author: William Leith, Acting General Manager, Application, Operations and Delivery Services, Federal Student Aid
Subject: Number of Applications Received by State for 2007-2008 and 2008-2009: Report Modification
The attached reports provide a count of Free Applications for Federal Student Aid (FAFSAs) received by the Central Processing System (CPS) from each state for the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 award years. The reports, posted in both Excel and PDF, identify the source of those applications (i.e. paper, electronic, or Web) and display figures for both dependent and independent students. In addition, the number of applications received from each state is further broken down by the language of the application (English or Spanish) as well as by the preparer of the application (student or financial aid administrator).
The state value is obtained from the applicant's answers to the state of legal residence questions on the FAFSA (question 18 for the student and question 68 for the parent). Each report begins with data for a state of legal residence that is blank, which identifies applicants that did not provide an answer to question 18 or 68.
We have provided reports for the third quarter of 2008-2009 (all processing to date), the identical quarter of 2007-2008 (so you may compare 2008-2009 processing with data from the same time last year), and all processing to date for 2007-2008. Please see each report for the specific dates covered by the report.
- The total number of applications on these reports only includes initial (01) transactions, which excludes corrections.
- The column "Electronic Other Original" refers to the submission of FAFSA data using the Electronic Data Exchange (EDE) process.
- These reports are run on a quarterly basis. The number of weeks in each quarter may vary by award year. Please keep that in mind if you use the data in the reports to perform a comparison between award years.
Modification to the Reports
NEW! Effective with this current set of reports, the reports do include rejected 01 transactions. The reports provided in the past did not include rejected transactions, despite a statement in our electronic announcement that indicated otherwise. We became aware of this error when report users asked us for clarification of what appeared to be an unusually large increase in the number of applications we had received in 2008-2009 as compared to the number we received in 2007-2008. While there has been a significant increase in applications for 2008-2009, the increase is not as large as previous reports may have indicated, because (1) earlier reports did not include rejected transactions as they should have, and (2) the number of rejected transactions has gone down for 2008-2009.
The purpose of these reports is to show all initial applications received by each state, regardless of the status of the record. Therefore, we have corrected the criteria we use to run these reports to include both rejected and non-rejected transactions. Please keep this modification in mind as you review the data in this current set of reports. We apologize for any confusion this caused.
If You Have Questions
If you have any questions please contact CPS/SAIG Technical Support at
800/330-5947 (TDD/TTY 800/511-5806) or by e-mail at CPSSAIG@ed.gov.