Notes on the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021

• Elimination of SULA (Subsidized Usage Limit Applies – 150% subsidized loan limit enacted in 2013 to fund one year of reduced undergraduate interest rates)
• FAFSA simplification
  • Elimination of the drug conviction question
  • Elimination of the selective service registration question/requirement
  • No asset questions for applicants with means-tested benefits and with incomes below $60K, or for dependent students whose parents make less than $60K and file simple tax returns
• Switch from Expected Family Contribution (EFC) to Student Aid Index (SAI)—usage will be essentially the same, but SAI terminology removes the suggestion that it’s a requirement for families to pay, more accurately framing it as an index used to determine aid eligibility
  • Some changes to SAI calculation from current EFC
  • Can be a negative number, as low as -$1500, allowing neediest students to receive up to $1500 above their Cost of Attendance in aid
  • Used to determine eligibility for all awards except maximum and minimum Pell Grant
• Pell Grant eligibility determined based on family size and income, allowing creation of a Pell Grant look-up table to help families start planning earlier
  • Eligibility for maximum Pell is indexed to federal poverty level and tax filing status, and is also awarded to students under age 33 whose parent died serving in the armed forces after September 11, 2001
• Students with divorced or separated parents will report information for the parent providing the most financial support, rather than the parent the student lives with
• Pell Grant eligibility restored for incarcerated students
• Professional Judgment (PJs)changes:
  • Institutions prohibited from refusing all PJs
  • Aid administrators can make determination of parent refusal to provide support or complete FAFSA in order to offer an unsubsidized loan to a dependent student
  • PJ permitted in qualifying emergencies to allow income from work to be zeroed out with documentation of unemployment application or receipt (similar to 2009 guidance stemming from the Great Recession)
• Provisional Independent Status: This permits an otherwise dependent applicant to apply with provisional independent status, smoothing the path for the student to start down the dependency override road if they are likely to qualify, generating a Pell Grant estimate and a response from the institution to help them navigate the PJ process.
• Unaccompanied Homeless Youth: allows an aid administrator to accept a prior-year determination of UHY status from another school
• Cost of Attendance (COA) changes: ED is currently prohibited from regulating COA—the biggest COA change is that ED will have the authority to regulate all components except for tuition and fees. Other changes:
  • Living expense allowances for meal plans must provide the equivalent of at least 3 meals daily
  • Loan fee allowance must reflect actual loan fees, not estimated, and cannot include private loan fees
  • One-time cost of obtaining professional licensure MUST be included for affected students, including incarcerated students
  • Schools must publish a list of all COA components and must disclose this information on any portion of the website describing tuition and fees
• Debt relief to Historically Black Colleges and Universities that received funds from the Capital Financing Program and have been left unable to repay due to the pandemic—expected to forgive more than $1.3 billion for over 40 HBCUs
• Pell Grant eligibility restoration for students who were unable to complete their programs due to their institutions closing, were falsely certified as financial aid-eligible, or whose loans were discharged in a borrower defense claim
• Data sharing—a question will be added to the FAFSA to enable applicants to authorize ED to share FAFSA information (including IRS data) with agencies providing public benefits, and also allows research to use FAFSA information (but not tax data) for research that doesn’t release PII to promote college attendance, persistence, and completion