University of Minnesota Twin Cities Early Action for Fall 2025 Admission

Has anyone else received an email from UMN-twin cities financial aid saying their FAFSA IS INVALID?

My D received one this morning, we checked FAFSA site, no change in what was there since successfully processed in late November.

She has a sent an email to University, no response yet.

Wondering if this relates to shutdown activities at US Dept of Education.

Weird. Our SAI showed up in the UMN portal last week, so I took that to mean the U had successfully processed the FAFSA. Did you notice if that happened for you before your D got the email?

We’ve been really frustrated with communications from UMN. We reached out several times and never heard back. We messaged our regional rep but the response was basically “thanks for your patience, but keep waiting.” It’s just such a weird thing to do if they actually want us to attend. Maybe we are the exception, but if they’re ghosting admitted students, I can’t imagine their attitude when they already have your money.

When you say “portal” are you meaning the admissions portal or some other place on the MyU site?

We have nothing on the admissions portal and had never been notified before one way/other to visit MyU.

My daughter received an email this morning, on her personal email, directing her to log into her MyU email or the MyU financial aid page, to find out important info about her FAFSA. She did so, and
 (revert to my previous post).

MyU responded later that someone in the bureaucracy would respond in 2 days. I’ll follow-up here afterwards.

By portal, I meant our account in MyU where they post the bill, financial aid offers etc. I’ll check with my kid and report back as well.

I did see elsewhere that studentaid.gov was out of service for a while today, so maybe it’s somehow related.

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We are getting plenty of Marketing emails from schools in this tier of colleges, Many no longer apply, since we have already completed the task (submitted FAFSA, submitted honors or scholarship apps, signed up for visits, etc.). But to get a human to respond to an individual issue/concern is very difficult.

(I expect to get some kind of Rah-Rah “what do you expect from a big university?” response, momentarily. Sorry, for $60+K/yr I expect better.)

I always wonder is this the service my kid will get when they are trying to get an advisor’s ear, registering for classes, or have some other important and legitimate concern/issue that has a deadline?

Meanwhile, “please press the commit button
”

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Thanks

Yes! I cannot agree more with this.

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I just looked at MyU and my daughter did get a notice about her FAFSA being on hold. The University of Dayton, where my older son goes, processed the form without a problem.

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Thank you. I hope to find out what is behind this. They made it seem as if we were responsible. As far as I know, we have been hunky-dory since the new FAFSA site was Beta.

We have 15 schools in-process, most have acknowledge receipt, this is the first to say we messed up.

One thing FAFSA didn’t do when building it, is to add a notification when the info is sent/downloaded to the designated colleges.

I can hear the “it’s better than last year crowd” waking up.

Did you call One Stop? I’ve found that’s usually the fastest way to a human, though I’m not sure how much they help with incoming students as opposed to those who are already enrolled.

Did you figure out what it was? We looked at ours and don’t really see anything
and the 6 other schools we applied to accepted it.

They gave me an odd response, basically telling me not to bother them because our financial aid package was not available.

I gave up for the time being, cuz it was they who originally told me there was a problem with our FAFSA, when there was not a problem at our end.

A few days later they sent us an Estimated Financial Aid package.

Go figure.

Hi all, parent of 2026 kid here. We are in the process of figuring out our college list. Just wanted to confirm with the admitted parents here because I have gotten conflicting info. Does UMN require recommendation letters? Because our school doesn’t provide rec letters till mid October, and I have heard its good to apply early.
Its is a reach for my kid, his GPA is on the lower side as he will be applying as a Biology or something related major, but his SAT score is pretty decent. So he wants to maximize his chances by applying early if rec letters are not required.
Thanks in advance for the replies.

Using Common App:

Teacher LORs - None Required, 1 Optional
Other Recommenders - None Required, 1 Optional

Other Recommenders include:

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Thank you for that. My son hasn’t created Common App account yet, so we don’t have access to this. We checked the UNM website and it says essay not required and LORs not required.

No Recs needed. You can also use their golden gopher app as UMN does not need the common app essays also. They take the courses/grades from the SRAR. S25 applied without recs using golden gopher app and was admitted within 10 days.

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