Education Secretary Arne Duncan is expected to announce a plan today to make it easier for students and their families to apply for federal financial aid.
Simplifying the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, the form the government uses to assess student need, is a goal President Obama repeatedly pitched as a candidate on the campaign trail.
Education Department officials released a preview of their plan on Tuesday, outlining three steps they will take toward that goal.
They say they will streamline the online Fafsa application by allowing people to skip questions irrelevant to their situations, asking Congress to strike dozens of questions from the form about family income and assets that go beyond what families have to report on tax returns, and allowing some aid applicants to easily retrieve tax data to fill out portions of the form.
The Fafsa, created by Congress in 1992, has been widely derided for its complexity. At his confirmation hearing this year, Mr. Duncan quipped that “you basically have to have a Ph.D. to figure that thing out.”
Students are asked to answer as many as 153 questions on the application, and Education Department officials estimate that 1.5 million students who are enrolled in college and who probably would be eligible for federal Pell Grants failed to file a Fafsa to apply for that aid.
Irrelevant Questions
Education Department officials will begin this summer to make changes to the online application that will allow individuals to skip more questions that do not apply to them than they can now. For instance, students who are exempt from providing their parents’ financial information—such as people who are married or who are 24 or older—will be able to skip 11 questions that are used to determine whether parental information needs to be provided. Men older than 26 will no longer have to field a question about registering with the Selective Service.
By January, the department said, more changes will be put in place. Students from some of the lowest-income families will no longer be asked for information about assets because that data is not used to determine their eligibility for aid. Students who are entering their first year of college will no longer be asked about prior drug convictions because the question is relevant only for returning students.
State governments also use the federal form to determine eligibility for student aid, and some of the questions on the form were placed there at the request of states. The Education Department said it would work with state agencies to make it easier for aid applicants to answer questions that individual states need answers to but that the federal government does not.
Fewer Questions About Assets
In the second step of the department’s simplification plan, officials said, they will ask Congress to pass legislation to eliminate a number of questions on the Fafsa and let families apply for student aid by using the same information they provide on federal income-tax returns.
The Fafsa now requires people to answer dozens of questions about their income and assets that they do not have to answer on federal tax forms. The department said that those questions yield information that is “largely unverifiable” and that adds very little to the process of awarding aid.
The six questions the Fafsa asks about assets, for example, affect the awards of only 3 percent of Pell Grant recipients, the department said. Those questions also penalize families that save for college, the department argued, while opening loopholes that allow sophisticated applicants to “game” the system.
Use of Tax Data
Education Department officials said the proposed legislative changes would “open the door” to using data from the Internal Revenue Service to provide answers to financial questions that remain on the Fafsa, so that families would only need to answer “easy personal questions” to apply for federal student aid.
To that end, the department said the third step of its plan will be to allow students and families who are applying for financial aid for the spring semester to retrieve tax information from the IRS that they can use to answer 18 financial questions that the department plans to keep on the aid form. Education officials said they would work with the IRS to examine whether it would eventually be possible to expand this option to all students.
Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said the department’s plan is “a middle-of-the-road approach” to simplifying the federal student-aid application process. As such, he said, it avoids the kinds of pitfalls and potential unintended consequences that could have accompanied a more-radical overhaul, such as one that would have pared back the form to just a handful of questions.
He predicted wide support for the department’s plan, including in Congress. “There is a lot of political enthusiasm” in both parties, Mr. Hartle said, for making the application process easier. “This is good news for the millions of students and families who wrestle with the Fafsa each year.”
