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.
The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
An Answer on a Postcard
Simplifying Fafsa Will Get More Kids Into College
WASHINGTON — THIS year, more than 20 million college students will complete the dreaded 108-question Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the Fafsa. Most do it again every year they’re in school. Some pay someone to help them. Colleges hire thousands of staff members to assist. Too many students are so intimidated by the form that they don’t bother to apply.
The Fafsa has 10 pages of detailed questions, explained by 72 pages of instructions, to complete an application that could be just two questions.
To give millions of hours back to American families, to remove what stands in the way of some students’ going to college and to save dollars that could be better spent on instruction, we are proposing legislation to reduce the federal financial aid application to a form the size of a postcard.
They'll have to change the entire Federal formula for calculating EFC, not that that would be a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteOn 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.