How to Get Students to Fill Out the Fafsa? Enlist Instagram Influencers

Updated (2/13/2019, 11:40 a.m.) with comments from the U.S. Department of Education.

Instagram influencers, or people who have a bevy of followers and manicured photos on the social-media website, will try to sell you weight-loss tea, prepared-meal kits, or subscription boxes of dog treats. Now, a select few influencers are hawking the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form.

Despite the possibility of free money, some prospective and current college students don’t fill out the form, known as the Fafsa. The process can be confusing and lengthy. But in a social-media-savvy move, the U.S. Department of Education has teamed up with Instagram influencers and college bloggers to prompt more students to apply, with the hashtag #ButFirstFAFSA.

“The department recognizes that we have to meet students where they are to help them reach their educational goals,” said Liz Hill, an Education Department spokeswoman, in a written statement. “That’s exactly what the #ButFirstFAFSA campaign is all about.”

About 1,000 posts carry the hashtag, and are marked with #ad and #sponsored to show that an influencer was paid to publish the content. Most images feature smiling young women — posing in front of their university, drinking coffee, reading a book.

“Fantasizing about getting into your dream school? But first, FAFSA,” reads one photo caption from Dagny Zhu, an ophthalmologist and influencer in Los Angeles. “Getting accepted to Harvard Med was an unexpected dream come true for me. But coming from a low-income, public-school upbringing, I had no idea how I would be able to afford a private-school education.”

Zhu, who has about 30,000 followers, joined the campaign after she was contacted by The Gramlist, a platform that connects brands (and now the federal government) to influencers. She declined to state how much she had been paid per post, but said that the compensation varies, depending on the account.

“The Gramlist probably found me on Instagram and found that I had a following of mostly high-school or college students going into medicine,” she said, adding that she had not interacted with the Education Department directly.

Influencers were asked to curate several different posts and link to the Fafsa website from their profile. Influencers in fashion, fitness, and medicine were approached with similar offers.

The captions all carry an inspiring tone: Attending college was a dream for the bloggers, made possible with federal financial aid.

“As a first-generation immigrant, I would not be where I am today without financial aid,” says another of Zhu’s captions. There were no guidelines on what to post or caption, Zhu said, but she was asked vaguely to “share anything from a nontraditional point of view.”

According to the National College Access Network’s Fafsa tracker, only 38 percent of high-school seniors have submitted a Fafsa form so far. The deadline is June 30, 2020, for next year’s aid cycle.

Every year the department opens a campaign to promote its student-aid offerings. Like its predecessors, #ButFirstFAFSA encourages students to fill out the online application.

This year’s focus is on the new myStudentAid mobile app, a tool that allows families to file the Fafsa on their phones. As of February 11, the department said, the mobile app had been downloaded more than 520,000 times.

Clarification (2/12/2019, 4:19 p.m.): A previous version of this article stated that the deadline to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form is June 30 for next year’s aid cycle. The deadline is June 30, 2020.

Follow Terry Nguyen on Twitter at @terrygtnguyen, or email her at terry.nguyen@chronicle.com.