It’s the final Fafsa workshop at H.D. Woodson High School in Northeast Washington, and Charles Coleman is bent over a computer in a room lined with college pennants, filling out the federal application for student aid.
The 18-year-old senior enters his name and Social Security number, checks the box to register for the Selective Service, lists the five colleges he’s applying to, and then hits the first hurdle: the dependency determination. His aunt and uncle have custody of him, but he’s not sure if he’s in a “legal guardianship.” Brett Gotlib, a college preparatory adviser with the College Success Foundation, tells him to answer no, since his father is claiming him as a dependent on his tax form.
Moving on, he gets to the question about household size. Another quandary. Should he count his grandmother, who gets financial support from his dad? What about his sister, who doesn’t live at home, but who also gets support from his father? After consulting with Ms. Gotlib, he settles on four.
It’s a scene playing out in classrooms and living rooms across the country, as students and their parents puzzle over the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, the much-maligned form that provides access to billions of dollars in federal grants and loans for postsecondary education. As of late March, more than eight million applicants had filed the form with the Education Department for the 2015-16 academic year.
But millions of needy students won’t complete the Fafsa, as the form is known, or they’ll file it too late to qualify for billions of dollars in state and institutional aid. That troubles student-aid researchers and policy makers alike, who say the form is keeping some low-income students from attending college. With an eye toward simplification, they’ve proposed everything from stripping the questions about assets and additional income, to shrinking the 10-page form to the size of a postcard and seeking just two pieces of information: family size and income.
But there are drawbacks to dropping questions from the form. Removing questions about assets would make more students appear needy and increase the cost of the federal aid programs; reducing the form to postcard-size could compel colleges and states to create more complicated forms to award their own aid.
“The fewer questions you ask, the more homogeneous the population looks,” said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “The fewer questions you ask, the more likely schools will just add another layer.”
“Then you’ve taken one step forward and two steps back,” he said.
Another option is to shorten the Fafsa without actually shortening it, by making it easier for students to import their tax information directly from the Internal Revenue Service. That idea, which is being pushed by a large coalition of colleges and advocates, is to allow applicants whose households haven’t yet filed their income taxes for the previous year to populate their form using tax data from two years prior. Now, only applicants who have filed their prior year’s taxes can use the IRS data-retrieval tool.
Switching to “prior-prior year data” would streamline the application process and likely increase the Fafsa completion rate. And the Education Department already has the authority to allow it. There’s just one problem: the cost.
Making the form easier to complete is likely to encourage more students to apply for aid. And “if more federal applicants receive federal aid, the funding required to maintain the programs goes up,” explains Reid Setzer, policy and legislative affairs analyst at Young Invincibles.
An Impediment to Access
At H.D. Woodson High School, a predominantly black institution in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, it’s not the form’s complicated financial questions that are tripping up students; it’s their complicated life circumstances.
Students here are often unsure whom to include in family size, and who claims them as a dependent, says LD Ross Jr., vice president for programs at the nonprofit District of Columbia College Access Program. Some are estranged from their parents, and can’t get their tax information.
Margaret Montague Feldman, a college adviser who works with low-income students at T.C. Williams High School, in Alexandria, Va., said parents are often reluctant to give out their income over the phone.
“They don’t know who I am, what the Fafsa is, and why they need to be giving this personal information,” said Ms. Feldman, who works for the Virginia College Advising Corps, which places recent University of Virginia graduates in high-need schools throughout the state. “The issue is not so much with the number of questions as it is with the difficulty of getting that information.”
Limiting the Fafsa’s questions to family size and adjusted gross income wouldn’t do much for these students, but it might encourage some others to at least attempt the daunting form. Last year, roughly a quarter of high-school seniors in the district’s public and charter schools did not complete the Fafsa, Mr. Ross said. At H.D. Woodson, where nearly all the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, fewer than half the seniors had submitted the form by mid-March.
“It’s definitely an impediment for low-income students and students of color,” he said.
Nationwide, roughly two million undergraduates did not file the Fafsa in 2011-12, according to a recent analysis by Mark Kantrowitz, a student-aid expert with Edvisors.com. If they had, they would have qualified for as much as $9.5 billion in federal Pell grants, and almost $3 billion in state and institutional aid.
In a survey, roughly half the nonfilers said they assumed they weren’t eligible for aid. A third said they didn’t want to take on debt. Fewer than 10 percent said the aid application was too much work.
In fact, filling out the Fafsa is much simpler than it used to be. Nearly all applicants now complete the form online, where skip-logic and IRS retrieval can allow them to bypass many of the form’s 108 questions and pre-fill others. Those technologies have cut the average time to complete the Fafsa from over an hour to just over 20 minutes, according to the Education Department. Less than half of 1 percent of applicants still fill out the 10-page paper form.
Still, nearly everyone agrees that more drastic simplification is in order.
Fafsa on a Postcard
The most radical option on the table is Sen. Lamar Alexander’s proposal to shrink the Fafsa to the size of a postcard. Under the Tennessee Republican’s plan, the IRS would determine a student’s eligibility for Pell Grants based on just two variables: family size, and income from two years prior. Families could consult a simple chart to see how large an award they would receive.
The concept, which can be traced to an eight-year-old research paper, has intuitive appeal. It would simplify the application process, make award determinations predictable, and help families plan for college. But skeptics fear it could backfire, if states and colleges stopped relying on the federal methodology to award aid, and created their own forms to assess need.
Frank Ballmann, director of federal relations for the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs, said his office has had discussions with Senator Alexander’s staff over how a shortened form could still meet states’ needs. His organization has identified five additional questions that states would need to ask to award aid.
“There’s a consensus that simplification is only simplification if it doesn’t create additional forms,” Mr. Ballmann said.
Meanwhile, President Obama has called for removing up to 30 questions from the form. Those include questions pertaining to assets, savings, investments and net worth, as well as untaxed income and exclusions from income data that aren’t reported to the IRS.
Supporters of the president’s approach acknowledge that it could drive up the costs of federal aid programs, at least modestly. But they argue that it would be worth it, if it encouraged more low-income students to apply for aid.
A third option, and one that wouldn’t require trimming the form, would be allowing applicants to populate the Fafsa using “prior-prior-year” tax data from the IRS. That change would eliminate the need for students who file their Fafsa before they (or their parents) file their taxes to update their income data later on, and it would reduce the number of applications subject to the paperwork-intensive “verification” process.
Ms. Feldman, the college adviser, said allowing applicants to input prior-prior-year data “would greatly reduce the number of students who get lost in the shuffle” of income updates and verification.
“It’s hard enough getting them into my office to fill it out,” she said. “We often lose them after the first step.”
The shift could also encourage more students to apply for aid in January and February, before the scholarship deadlines set by many states, colleges, and outside groups. Students who now wait to file the Fafsa till after they file their taxes often miss out on these additional sources of money.
So why isn’t the Education Department exercising its authority to allow prior-prior-year data? The answer boils down to money. In some cases, students and families’ incomes from two years prior would be lower than their income from the prior year, so their awards would be larger.
Making the process easier for students would also likely increase the number of students applying for aid. That would drive up program costs, too.
Supporters say the administration wants to get a better handle on just how much the shift would cost before it moves forward with the change.
One at a Time
In the meantime, college advisers like Mr. Ross will continue to coach students through the sometimes complicated process, pushing to get more low-income students into college.
Back at H.D. Woodson high school, Mr. Coleman is fretting about the cost of college. He worries that “the financial ability won’t be there” and that he won’t be able to afford his top pick, Marshall University. Ms. Gotlib reminds him that he’ll have scholarships from her organization and the D.C. government, and will probably qualify for the maximum Pell Grant.
He’s not convinced. He wants to know if he can transfer if he can’t afford it.
“I just always have a backup plan,” he says.
Ms. Gotlib recommends that he file the form earlier next year, so he’ll qualify for even more aid.
“But what if,” he says, trailing off.
“What if, what if, what if,” Ms. Gotlib says, ribbing him. “Focus on what you can do.”
By the end of the final Fafsa workshop at H.D. Woodson, five more students had filed the form.
“We’ll take it,” says Mr. Ross. “One at a time.”
