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Fix FAFSA!

Five ways to simplify student aid.

By Pat Wingert | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Jun 25, 2009

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Mention the acronym FAFSA to any parent with a college-age child and you are almost certain to see a shudder of dread. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, required for most types of student financial assistance, consists of 53 questions spread over 20 computer screen-pages and is notoriously befuddling. Some parents spend hours filling it out; others hire financial-aid consultants to do it for them. But many, especially low-income parents, become so intimidated by FAFSA that they give up before they finish, even though their kids have the most to gain financially by filing the application. As a result, millions of students never get the financial aid they're entitled to; the U.S. Department of Education estimates that for Pell Grants alone, about 1.5 million students a year miss out because they fail to apply.

That's why Education Secretary Arne Duncan's announcement Wednesday that his department is streamlining the FAFSA process and cutting the application in half is welcome news. Duncan says there are even plans to add a new button to the online application that will authorize the IRS to automatically fill in the required financial data directly from filed tax returns, something advocates have wanted for years.

But critics say a lot more can and should be done to improve this byzantine process, and Duncan says he's open to ideas: "This is just the first step." Here are five ideas he might consider:

*Take his Chicago experience national. When Duncan was superintendent of Chicago's schools, he worked with a state agency to monitor what proportion of seniors from each of his high schools had completed FAFSA forms, and encouraged principals to work toward 100 percent participation. Duncan could instruct the Department of Education to do something similar, or at least use his bully pulpit to encourage superintendents around the country to follow his example.

* Boil the whole application down to a waiver to permit the IRS to provide a family's financial data to the Department of Education, which in turn, would then generate a statement detailing the amount of aid each student could expect to receive.

* Don't wait for students to apply. Instead, the government could automatically determine eligibility based on data included on tax returns, and send out letters to students alerting them to their eligibility and giving them details on how to complete the process.

* Since annual income typically doesn't change much year to year, why not start the process much earlier? The government could send out notices to 8th graders or high-school freshmen detailing how much college aid they are likely to qualify for when they finish high school. Confidence that they will be able to finance a college education could be just the inspiration struggling students need to work harder throughout high school, which in turn will make them better prepared to succeed in college.

* Encourage states to make similar changes so students get clearer and earlier information about the state aid they are eligible to receive.

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Posted By: texasutdemocrat @ 07/17/2009 1:51:13 PM

I agree with MacAdvisor on this issue. Having an age dependency for 24 years old is completely unrealistic. My parents earned a decent living but due to some financial issues in thier past were not able to provide financial assistance to me during college. The result? As a 25 year old college graduate I owe 45k in student loans because i was unable to recieve one drop of federal money despite graduating from a poor rural town as a national merit scholar. In addition, my mother and father now live halfway across the country and I was forced to sit out a semester of college because i wasn't able to collect their tax information from them in a timely manner. If the governement wants to fix the system they should lower the dependency age, make it easier to file as an independent, and use a more accurate measure of a student's abliity to pay for college then how much their parents reported on the taxes.
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Posted By: tototoo82 @ 06/28/2009 4:18:24 PM

Dear Mr. President, The trouble with FAFSA is not the length of it. Obviously it will help us all a great deal to be able to import tax information into the form, but this will not necessarily help with the overall situation. What the biggest issue is, sir, is that the dependency cut off is 24 years old. If you really wanted to effect change in eligibility then sit down and make the cut off 20 years old. Sir, I'd like to invite you to spend a couple of hours seeing what sort of havoc the dependency rules create. There is no such thing as a 'normal' situation any more. How many more dreams must we shatter because a 19,20, or 21 year old who has no contact with their parents cannot complete a FAFSA because they are considered 'dependent'? No, it's not that easy to get a dependency override. These kids are supporting themselves, and gee, old enough to serve in the Armed Forces but not old enough to go to school without mom and dad's information? Seriously, Mr. President, what's wrong with this picture? You want to simplify student aid? Come talk to me and my coworkers because we are in the trenches every single day dealing with this.
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Posted By: MacAdvisor @ 06/26/2009 7:09:10 PM

The problem with the FAFSA is and will remain that it requires a population of mostly adults to apply based on their parents income, something to which they do not have a claim. I am 52-years old and am going back to school in September. I don't have to provide tax returns and income statements from my 78-year old father. Why should an 18-year old adult have to supply information about his 40-year old father and mother? Parents are not generally legally mandated to pay for college, so a child doesn't have any right to participation by the parents. The real solution is to provide financial aid to anyone, even children with wealthy parents, to go to college. We could limit the amount to that needed to attend state schools and let private schools either provide the difference or talk the parents into providing it. After our foolish and wasteful health care system, our system of paying for higher eduction is the next disgrace. We want our population to go to college, just like we want them to finish high school. We want them to go to graduate school. We should pay for it and stop needing 40 page forms to do it.