Even after FAFSA chaos, URI forecasts healthy enrollment in both summer and fall semesters

Applicants for federal student aid, commonly known as FAFSA, encountered great difficulty completing the form this year. Seen here is a billboard advertising FAFSA completion off I-95 in Providence in April 2024. (Alexander Castro/Rhode Island Current)

Summer vacation season may be approaching, but Rhode Island’s largest public university won’t be empty in the coming months.

Summer enrollment is up 8% at the University of Rhode Island (URI) this year, university officials shared during a Monday meeting of the school’s Board of Trustees’ Academic Affairs and Research Committee. That means about 4,500 students will populate the Kingston campus this summer. 

During the committee’s last meeting until fall semester, Dean Libutti, associate vice president for enrollment management and student success, showed the board some optimistic enrollment figures both during and after the summer months. 

Thanks to a strategic initiative that saw the university secure more federal funding for Pell Grants, Libutti said that there’s been a 13% increase in Pell Grant completion. This summer, 691 students will take six or more classes at URI thanks to year-round Pell Grants.

Libutti also discussed the fallout from this year’s botched rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The federal financial aid form was a “disaster for everyone in education,” he said, during his recap of the form’s delayed and bug-ridden release. Colleges rely on the federally procured FAFSA data to make financial aid decisions, but data arrived from the feds much later than expected, wreaking havoc on decision deadlines and affecting families’ and schools’ ability to determine the most financially sound options. 

“Right now, the FAFSA is working better,” Libutti said. “Nationally, FAFSA completion rates are still down 13% year over year.” 

Back in March, FAFSA completion rates were 40% lower year-over-year. 

Despite the struggles, URI awarded financial aid to over 13,000 students this year. Libutti said the school is still working with families who have their FAFSA rejected or didn’t complete it in time. “And there are many,” Libutti said.  

As for the fall semester, URI would like to see 3,235 students enrolled. As of Monday morning, the school was fast approaching that target, with 3,200 enrollees so far. New student applications also broke a record, Libutti said, with 26,945 applicants for fall 2024 — 1,500 more than last year. 

Libutti said a team working overtime — sometimes up to 12 or 15-hour days — meant the school was able to recover from FAFSA’s messy national rollout. He was, however, “quite nervous” about summer melt, the term for when students pay a deposit at one school but decide to attend another school. With schools’ financial aid systems in disarray because of the problematic FAFSA rollout, where students ultimately decide to attend is more up in the air than years past, so Libutti said he’s carefully monitoring summer melt.

“It’s been a tough year, and it will be a busy summer to see how we get through to September,” Libutti said. He praised URI employees in the IT department who contributed to the school’s quick maneuvering around FAFSA-related delays. 

 “I’m in touch with a number of schools around the country, and it’s been a fiasco,” the committee’s chair, Neil Kerwin, said. “It’s put some smaller colleges in particular at terrible risk.”

The post Even after FAFSA chaos, URI forecasts healthy enrollment in both summer and fall semesters appeared first on Rhode Island Current.