 "Photo: Daniela Trujilloe/The Daily Texan")
Students applying for financial aid will find a much more streamlined application beginning in the spring of 2010.
The Obama-Biden Administration announced this week that they will soon implement changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in an effort to make financial aid funds more available to students.
The reformed application will omit many questions regarding detailed personal information, making the form simpler and easier to complete. The Department of Education is also seeking to improve the online FAFSA application by enabling the Web site to automatically retrieve tax return data from the Internal Revenue Service, which will allow students to bypass complicated questions.
Tom Melecki, UT Student Financial Services director, said the length of the application only makes it more difficult for the office to work out students’ aid awards.
“The FAFSA is incredibly long and asks for a lot of duplicate information that the student or parent has already provided to the federal government on tax forms,” Melecki said. “It’s inefficient to ask them to provide that a second time just because the information is going to another office of government.”
He said that the overly specific questions on the FAFSA may be too complex for applicants to answer.
“We find that sometimes students and even parents will provide the wrong data,” he said. “The questions are often very complex, and they use legal or administrative terminology that the average person doesn’t understand.”
Incoming freshman Stephen Jaquess said the FAFSA was the most difficult form he had to fill out during the college application process.
“I know a bunch of friends who are economically in need, but they didn’t try and tackle the FAFSA because they thought it was too complicated,” Jaquess said. “It ultimately hurt them because they couldn’t afford to go to the schools they wanted and had to go to other places. If they develop a new image of the FAFSA, I think the number of people applying would definitely increase.”
Undeclared business junior Matthew Diehl said that while the application is time-consuming, students will be required to complete several lengthy forms for college.
“You have to be prepared to jump through hoops with things like financial aid and registering for classes,” he said. “If you’re not willing to do those initial things, maybe college is not for you.”
Melecki said efforts to reduce the number of questions in the FAFSA are a step towards making common sense improvements to the financial aid process.
“My hope is it would be much easier for students and their parents to complete the FAFSA and do so more accurately,” he said. “Our office will have to spend less time working with students and parents to collect tax forms and other documents to verify information that they provided to us on the FAFSA if they make fewer mistakes.”
