Student Financial Aid News

From Inside Higher Ed:

In part because of the FAFSA’s multiple pages and scores of questions seeking personal and financial information about students and their families, many policy experts believe, hundreds of thousands of potential recipients forgo many millions of dollars of federal college aid each year. the Education Department will, right now, make several changes that do not require Congressional approval. This summer, the department will take advantage of existing technology on the Web-based FAFSA to allow married or independent students to skip questions about their parents, among others. In January, the department will stop requiring students with low incomes to answer questions about their financial assets, and only returning students will be asked about prior drug convictions, since the question does not affect first-year students. Department officials said they would work closely with state officials to set up the electronic form to “make it easier to answer questions that the states need but the federal government does not.”

January will also mark the start of the department’s test of a system to allow students who apply for aid for the spring 2010 semester to retrieve relevant tax information from the Internal Revenue Service to help them complete the online FAFSA. “When you’re online filling out the FAFSA, there’ll be a button that says, ‘Want to go get your IRS data?’ ” said Shulman of the IRS.

Commentary

It’s good to see the first incremental steps towards making the FAFSA simpler. The IRS tax data import, if it works correctly, will be a giant timesaver for everyone involved, as those are the questions that students and families tend to get wrong.

A big part of next year’s FAFSA process, then, will be correctly filing your income taxes prior to filing your FAFSA in order to import your tax data. This might have the net effect of causing some folks to file later than usual, and for events like College Goal Sunday, push back the date a little so that families can get their taxes done.

As things develop, we’ll keep you informed of changes here and on FAFSAonline.com, our FAFSA advice site.

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