Universal FAFSA mandates and the activation of student aid

Hard universal Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) mandates require high school seniors to complete the FAFSA, submit an alternative state aid form, or obtain a waiver before graduation. We study early graduation-linked mandates in Louisiana, Illinois, Alabama, and Texas, building on prior state-specific causal evidence. We estimate completion effects with school-level Sun-Abraham event studies and downstream responses with state-year fixed-effects models. Hard mandates increase FAFSA completion by 11.8 percentage points. Federal aid applicants rise by 0.0869 applicants per senior. In later years, state grant and scholarship aid rises by 3.5 percentage points of average public in-state tuition and required fees. Enrolment estimates are positive but statistically indistinguishable from zero. These estimates suggest a large filing response and possible aid activation with no clear enrolment gain. With only four adopting states, we supplement state-clustered inference with wild cluster bootstrap checks. These leave the effects unchanged but produce wider intervals that include zero for completion and downstream outcomes. The results are consistent with the possibility that additional aid is too modest to induce enrolment, but aggregate outcomes do not establish this mechanism. Interpretation is limited by few treated states, short follow-up, and denominator and calendar constraints.