With the new school year starting, colleges nationwide will soon have to grapple with a new data challenge: the elimination of a question about students’ dependent children on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). This change comes in the wake of the FAFSA Simplification Act, which seeks to reduce redundant questions and streamline information sharing. But it also comes with drawbacks, especially for parenting students.

Identifying and characterizing parenting students is a critical first step to adequately supporting their success. Parenting students make up about one in five undergraduates and one in four graduate students. 

Urban research has shown that serving these students yields positive economic returns to taxpayers and that their academic success directly promotes intergenerational mobility. Without reliable data on this population, colleges, systems, and states will have to find new ways, likely involving original data collection, to identify and count parenting students.

The new FAFSA will not identify student parents

Previously, the FAFSA form (PDF) asked if applicants had “children who will receive more than half of their support from you.” Many colleges, systems, and states used answers to this question to gain insights on their students with dependent children. Although the question used a narrow definition of parenting students and not every student filled out the FAFSA (70 percent of undergraduate students and 50 percent of graduate students completed the form in the 2019–20 academic year), it still offered a clear and reliable data source on parenting students when few alternatives existed.

The new FAFSA form (PDF) asks how many people are in the student’s family and offers a check box to indicate if the student “has children or other people (excluding their spouse) who live with the student and receive more than half of their support from the student.” This question does not allow colleges to distinguish children from other dependents. In exchange for more-limited data on the FAFSA, colleges will receive linked data from students’ two-year-old tax records to assess students’ household situations and financial needs.

Taken alone, the inability to distinguish types of dependents might not pose an insurmountable obstacle. In 2019–20, 95 percent of students with dependents had a dependent child (and a fair share had both child and nonchild dependents). But other issues with the new FAFSA form are likely to undermine it as a source of reliable data on students’ parenting status:

• Limited question reach: The new FAFSA form does have a checkbox for students to indicate whether they have dependents. But if the system determines that the student is independent because they are 24 or older or because they are married, it does not offer (PDF) students this question (link updated 10/31/24). The US Department of Education has not communicated clearly about this skip logic, and students have expressed frustration on social media about the inability to fill out this part of the form. This means that, by design, many students cannot indicate that they have dependents on the FAFSA form.
• Dated information: By using two-year-old tax records, the new FAFSA form likely misrepresents the current family composition of many students. The new FAFSA portal only prompts corrections to the tax record if the student’s family size has changed but does not prompt if its composition has changed. For example, if a student was married without a child two years before their college application but were no longer married (or no longer in the same household) and had a child when they applied, they would have a household size of two in both cases but with a different composition. This experience could be common, as women often return to school following the dissolution of a marriage.
• Potential lack of privacy protections: Little information exists about the level of detail colleges will receive from tax records and how tax filings can inform programming or supports beyond financial aid. The National Association of Financial Aid Administrators clarified (PDF) that FAFSA data could be used for other purposes, but the integration with tax records introduces a new grey area in data privacy protections.

Several colleges and systems have expressed concern about the number of student-parent applicants for the 2024–25 academic year declining based on FAFSA filings, but it’s unsure if this trend is a true enrollment decrease or a product of these data challenges.

Other student-parent data collection efforts are necessary

Even before changes to the form, FAFSA was an incomplete data source. Now, with the new FAFSA structure, other data collection efforts will be even more important.

Four states—Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and Texas—have passed legislation requiring colleges to collect data on parenting status already, and California has created a de facto data collection requirement. Maryland and Michigan have also taken steps to implement their own requirements, though neither has currently active legislation.

How these states collect student-parent data can take many forms. The State of Texas and the California Community Colleges system have both integrated questions about parenting status into admission applications. The Common App, which is used by more than 1,000 colleges, includes a question about the student’s children on their first-year application (PDF) and added it to their transfer application (PDF) for the upcoming year—though not all member colleges download this data point. Federal legislation introduced in 2023 also proposed adding parenting status to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. And many individual colleges and systems are exploring data collection processes in response to state mandates.

Continuing to identify parenting students despite the FAFSA data collection changes is crucial for colleges, systems, and agencies to appropriately support student parents as they pursue their academic, family, and life goals. Urban’s Data-to-Action Campaign for Parenting Students offers other resources for these actors to collect and use data on parenting students. Earlier this year, we laid out technical considerations for student-parent data collection, and other Urban commentary identifies critical policy considerations around the design of legislation, regulation, and implementation of these efforts. We will provide more resources in the coming months to ensure data on parenting students are collected and used effectively.