Those of us who work at ICAN constantly deal with
the challenges of the Federal Student Aid ID.
This is the username, password, and email address that gets you into the
FAFSA and signs the FAFSA electronically.
It also gives students access to three other Federal Student Aid
websites. There has been a lot of
stress, confusion, and frustration in connection with the FSA ID involving
students and parents.
Why is it so nasty? People often don’t do a good job of keeping
track of the username, password, and email address. This is just a lack of human
organization. Once a Federal Student Aid
ID is created, a new one cannot be created.
You must discover the original FSA ID.
There are a set of challenge questions created in the FSA ID, but they
work a small percent of the time because people create bad challenge questions
and don’t know the answers to the challenge questions. Recovery by email is the most successful, but
some people don’t know the password to their email. The FSA ID needs to be written down and kept
in a safe place.
But there is hope on the horizon! Federal Student Aid (organization that
oversees the student financial aid process on the federal level) has added a
new method to recover the FSA ID through cell phone texting . This is similar to the email recovery except
a six digit code will be sent to your mobile phone. So if you as a student or parent of a
dependent student are going to create a FSA ID for the first time, you now have
the option to include a cell phone number for recovery by text. If you already created an FSA ID before May
14, 2017, you can log in to the FSA ID and add your cell phone number. It will have to be verified by your cell
phone text function with the six digit code to make it active.
Here are directions to add cell phone text
recovery:
Log in to an already existing FSA ID go to: fsaid.ed.gov. Click on the Manage My FSA ID tab. Log in with either the user name or email
address used in the FSA ID and with the password. Click yes to the security statement. Click yes to add mobile phone texting. Then add in the cell number twice and verify
with the six digit code through a text sent to your phone, and you are good to
go! If a parent has an FSA ID, do the
same with the parent FSA ID.
For security reasons, your password for your FSA
ID will need to be changed every 18 months.
So if you encounter a red warning with your FSA ID, it will tell you
that the password has to be changed.
Just click on change password and follow the steps. The best method to be successful with the FSA
ID is to write down your user name, password, and email address and keep it all
in a safe place. Hopefully this will
make the FSA ID more manageable and less “nasty.”
Steve - ICAN Council Bluffs Center
