Navigating Our Shameful, Maddeningly Complex Student Aid System -
This month, the federal government switched off a tool
that student financial aid applicants used to import their tax data into forms, adding laborious steps to a process that the tool was supposed to simplify.
There is one crucial caveat, however: For all we might do to make the system easier to understand and navigate, it would not change the fact
that there is often not enough aid money to make college affordable for all students who would apply or actually end up doing so.
One especially good idea that Professor Scott-Clayton of Columbia favors is to send notice of financial aid eligibility, based on income tax data, to a family in a student’s early high school years — in the same way
that Social Security lets you know what size check you might get at retirement age.
data into your Fafsa, errors would be unlikely, and you would stand a much lower chance
of going through a noxious verification process that many students endure.
Before the change, applying for aid this month might have been hard, because you might not have done your 2016 tax returns yet
and thus would not have been able to supply accurate income data.
The president had campaigned on a platform of eradicating the Fafsa altogether and replacing it with a box on tax forms
that people could check to export data to the college aid deciders.
That could offer encouragement to people who might otherwise assume
that college is financially out of reach, simply because they don’t know how the system works.