A world tangled up in red tape just got some welcome news.
The U.S. Education Department on Wednesday said that it had reduced the percentage of federal student-aid applicants it will select for verification, an onerous process that’s widely seen as a barrier to college for low-income and underrepresented students. In the past, the federal government has verified about 30 percent of all aid applications in each enrollment cycle; starting in 2020-21, it will verify 18 percent.
Verification can discourage students from completing the application process and enrolling in college.
That change, announced during a national conference for college financial-aid professionals, is an incremental but meaningful step toward simplifying the college-application process in an era of economic turmoil. Still, regardless of the overall selection rate nationally, this procedural burden will continue to fall most heavily on the students with the greatest need and fewest resources.
Though “verification” might sound bland and bureaucratic, it’s often an ordeal for everyone involved. If you don’t know about this time-consuming procedure, then you don’t work in a financial-aid office or advise the nation’s most vulnerable college applicants. And if you haven’t experienced it firsthand, then you probably didn’t grow up poor.
Let’s review. Students and parents must complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, to get government grants, scholarships, and loans. But each year, the Education Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid, known as FSA, requires many new and returning students — historically, about a third — to complete a second step called verification. Each aid applicant selected for the process must submit additional information to colleges, which then must verify the accuracy of each Fafsa flagged for review. Students must comply to get their money.
As The Chronicle described in an in-depth article, the “verification trap” snares many low-income students who often must navigate the process, by tracking down tax documents and completing confusing forms, with little or no help from their families or counselors. “We’re essentially asking poor people to prove that they’re poor over and over again,” one researcher said at the time, “that their life is as complicated as they say it is.”
Nobody questions the purpose of verification, which is to reduce fraud, correct errors, and ensure that the proper amounts of taxpayer money go to the right people. But many college-access advocates have long argued that the federal government must do more to ensure that fiscal responsibility doesn’t place undue obstacles before students trying to get to (and through) college. A longstanding question: Is verification worth all the trouble?
Not as it has traditionally functioned, some researchers say. The National College Attainment Network, known as NCAN, has found that verification can discourage students from completing the application process and enrolling in college. In 2015-16, just 56 percent of Pell-eligible students selected for verification went on to receive the grants, compared with 78 percent of those who weren’t selected.
Though there are surely a few reasons for that gap, one is that verification derails some college hopefuls who are very much entitled to their aid. NCAN estimates that verification kept one in five Pell-eligible students from receiving the grants that year.
As described in a recent policy brief, researchers at NCAN analyzed previously unreleased federal data to examine the trade-offs inherent in verification. They found that more than 70 percent of students who completed verification in 2018-19 and 2019-20 saw no change in their Pell Grant awards. That was especially true for qualified applicants with expected family contributions, or EFCs, of zero.
Moreover, NCAN’s analysis found that though the Education Department selected fewer students for verification before November 1, 2019, compared with the same point the previous year, it prevented a greater amount of improper overpayments — a 6-percent increase in savings. That finding suggested that a more targeted approach might help students and taxpayers alike.
A ‘Smarter Model’
And that more-targeted approach is now happening. According to slides that FSA shared with financial-aid administrators on Wednesday, it has been using machine learning to develop a “smarter model” for selecting applicants for verification. Over the last two cycles, the percentage of applications verified has been 22 percent, down from a high of 38 percent from 2011-12 to 2017-18.
FSA analyzed recent data to determine what its selection rate should be for the current cycle. “The costs of doing verification,” one slide said, “exceed the benefits when we verify for more than 18% of FAFSA filers.”
Justin Draeger, president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, described the decrease in the selection rate as meaningful progress. And he said in a message to The Chronicle that the Education Department had “confirmed what aid professionals have know for a long time: that at the end of the day, most verifications result in no change in grants for students. There’s more progress to be made, but we’re glad we’re at least on the right path.”
Selection rates will surely continue to vary widely from campus to campus. Many institutions, particularly two-year colleges, that enroll more low-income students have long reported selection rates that surpass the national averages.
And in many communities, verification will certainly remain a major hurdle for more than just 18 percent of students. Just ask Sara Urquidez, executive director of the Academic Success Program, a nonprofit group in Dallas that provides colleges advisers to 13 public high schools and charter schools with many low-income students.
On Wednesday she checked her numbers. So far this fall, 36 percent of college applicants her organization serves had been selected for verification. At one school, the rate is 54 percent.
“It’s one thing to say the overall number is going down, but too often we’re not looking at who’s being affected on the ground,” Urquidez said. “I don’t see verification numbers going down at Title I high schools. Verification continues to target and penalize students for being low income. It’s still very much affecting the students who are going to have the most trouble completing this process, especially in this virtual environment.”
Verification doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in a world where, especially now, many anxious students with tenuous college hopes are working one or more part-time jobs to support their families and pay electric bills, where many parents and guardians have lost jobs and caught Covid-19, where many homes lack technology needed to fulfill all the essential requirements of the college-application process.
For those reasons, the push to ease the burdens of verification isn’t just about tedious procedures and selection rates. It’s also about the challenges students must confront before they can even think about trying to get through all that red tape.
