Mention “FAFSA” to people in certain circles and you’ll get an earful coming back at you. FAFSA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid; it’s the form that students and parents fill out to apply for financial aid. Both government and institutions use data from the form to determine financial aid awards. The circles of people who will have something to say include students and their families, admissions and financial aid officials, scholars and activists who work in the higher education realm, and politicians.
In today’s Times Lamar Alexander, Republican senator from Tennessee who is a former secretary of education and Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator from Colorado and former superintendent of schools, argue for a super-simplified FAFSA and a whole other slew of federal financial aid reforms in a bill they are co-sponsoring.
- Simpler form (2 questions)
- Submit it earlier in process (so kids would know early in the college application process)
- Pell grants could be used year round
- Federal student loan repayment programs reduced to two: income based and 10 year option
Whether one agrees with proposal or not, an important piece of the policy debate is highlighted in their argument: the present system has billions of hidden costs in the amount of time students and families spend providing the information, schools and the government spend processing it, and what schools spend auditing the process.
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An Answer on a Postcard
Simplifying Fafsa Will Get More Kids Into College
They'll have to change the entire Federal formula for calculating EFC, not that that would be a bad thing.
On the other hand, much of the information on the FAFSA does a pretty good job of giving enough information to really figure out who has the resources (hidden or not) and who doesn't. For those who don't have the resources, all the questions are intimidating because they usually only have to fill out the 1040 EZ. Those that do have resources (some of which the feds have decided don't have to count in EFC) aren't so intimidated; plus, for those people, the FAFSA gives fa directors important information to locate resources that are there but not obvious.
So, what we need is a FAFSA and a FAFSA-EZ.