Obama Administration To Simplify Complex College Aid Application

President Obama has challenged the nation to once again have the highest percentage of college graduates in the world,
==========
I’m not sure why this is a goal in and of itself.
Surely college isn’t for everybody, and not all jobs require college graduation.
It is a goal in many countries- and used to be a goal here- to ensure a non-college graduate still has a chance at a middle-class lifestyle.
I hate to see qualified, intelligent students turned away from college for lack of funding. But I also hate to see an increase of funding just to boost college enrollment numbers.

Obama Administration To Simplify Complex College Aid Application ????? You would think that people who can’t complete the application might need more high school ?

John – 153 questions. Pay attention.
Most of the questions are either redundant or readily available to the reviewers via other federal systems, which they could (and should) have access to.
Also, the form requires students (many of whom have only recently completed high school) to provide a ton of information that would only be applicable to their parents or someone who has a breadth of work experience.
It’s a time-consuming and cumbersome process that is fraught with inefficiencies. The student is required to complete most of the information; however, they are also required to provide all of the financial data for their parents unless they can provide proof of independence (usu. meaning marriage, kids, or prior military service).

“Too often, they simply got frustrated, and they gave up. The form itself was literally a barrier to entering college. That has to change.”
What has to change is that students who really want to go to college should fill out the form.
Decades ago when my father refused to fill out the financial aid form (he was a government-hating, WWII veteran, Democrat, go figure), I found his tax records and filled it out myself. He reluctantly signed it.
I have filled out or helped fill out FAFSA forms for the past eight years (four kids). It isn’t difficult at all.
And, now that it can be done on the internet (public library has them if you don’t have a computer/internet), it takes about 10-15 minutes to fill out both the parent and student forms if you have your tax returns in front of you.
If you don’t want to go to college bad enough to answer questions such as…
Were you born before January 1st, 1986?
Have you been convicted for the possession or sale of illegal drugs for an offense that occurred while you were receiving federal student aid (grants, loans or work-study)?
-and-
As of today, are you married?
…then you just don’t want it badly enough.

We need fewer people to go to college and more to go directly into trade schools after high school. This would make things much more efficient and saddle fewer people with crushing debt.

“We need fewer people to go to college and more to go directly into trade schools after high school. This would make things much more efficient and saddle fewer people with crushing debt.”
You are 100% right. Go to the mall near your house and take a quick survey of minimum wage retail employees. See how many went to college for liberal arts degrees and then see how many went to a trade school for HVAC or airplane mechanics.
The trade school people will not be there. They will be at well-paying jobs in the field in which they were trained. The person taking your shoe size will have a degree in political science or psychology.

Thank you, Mr. President. I remembers when it wasn’t complicated.

Is it a form of hypocrisy to have the college application simplified so that students will not be discouraged to apply for a career and the mortgage lending application less complicated so that lenders is not encourage to cheat borrowers and borrowers to not live beyond their means and not simpliflying Mr. Obama cabinet’s application forms for fear of someone potentially embarassed our President, thus blocking the potential for bipartisanship?
Mr. Obama’s administration should just have an application form for a Cabinet position with one yes or no question only, instead of 10 pages of complex and nosy questionaires: Do you support Obama? Yes/No.

As a parent of a Fall 2009 college freshman, I have to say that if filling out the form is too complicated, then college will really be too complicated. Ninety per cent of success is following instructions and “showing up” on time.
It isn’t rocket science–the hardest part is trying to get it filled out in January, when some of the financial info is slow to arrive.

Danita- Nice job, I think that’s the first reasonable point you’ve made! But I wonder how you would feel about removing the months of endless calls without answers, the tens of thousands of dollars, months of time, volumes of code, and countless inspections it takes for a man to increase his wealth by putting a small building on his property, though?

Sorry, Danita, most of the worst examples, like the requirements to get special licensing from an (expensive!) state board of architectural engineers anytime the smallest amount of structural steel and conrete are used, or the measures of permeation of light through windows for energy efficiency, measures that are so complicated it takes another board of contracted computer software engineers to calculate the results (results that don’t even play-out in practice), are state mandated, federally funded ‘programs’. Maybe you should try building something.

I wouldn’t suggest it, though. It’s much easier to do paper-work in a fiat-currency funded office and pretend like you’re saving the world from the oppressor with more mandates and requirements. It also pays more currently.

I hear you Mark. I’ve never been in the development business so know nothing about it.
I am appalled to see people criticizing President Obama for simplifying government forms and red tape.
I have to say Obama seems like a very smart, practical and very dedicated person (Bush always struck me as a dabbler – put into positions in oil and baseball by his family and their friends, opting out of real military service, cross-addicted to cocaine and alchohol, crashing planes and so on)
. . . it’s almost impossible perhaps for one man, but Obama might actually make some things work in more practical ways.

I think Obama SHOULD make it really easy for students to get into as much debt as possible. After all, lots of homeowners easily got 0% down interest-only subprime mortgages and then…oh wait.

This seems like a great thing. Especially when you consider that the kids most in need of college and financial aid have parents who aren’t necessarily supportive to begin with.
Cutting down the red tape will make it easier for them to fill in the blanks for their parents.
Having said that, I am sure there are people that will be outraged over this for some reason or other.

It’s the one-two punch of ‘social justice’.

Really, though, all forces are in balance at all times. For example, if government becomes a cost, then people avoid it in favor of labor or risk, and if labor or is risk becomes too much of a cost, then people avoid it in favor of government, etc,etc. To me, though, it is simply inhumane to favor financial enlavement as a social necessity to enforce through elimination of alternatives, rather than as an opportunity to offer while preserving other alternatives.

(Bush always struck me as a dabbler – put into positions in oil and baseball by his family and their friends, opting out of real military service, cross-addicted to cocaine and alchohol, crashing planes and so on)-danita
Gotta get those zingers in don’tcha danita. You just can’t let it go can ya – the BDS that is. It’s like you’re addicted to it or something.

Also, at least in my state, if you aren’t able to manage two sides of a balance sheet you’ll face stiff competition very quickly from those who are, once you find a niche that works. I suspect the use of government grants and funding will begin to come into play in the same way, which doesn’t seem right to me.

When it comes to government we always must weigh what we might gain against what we might lose. I certainly don’t want government to crush entrepreneurial investment but at the same time if we learned anything from the Bush years [at the risk of riling up Timmy and others] we need government to protect us from unscrupulous businessmen. Where was it that they wanted to ban burning wood as a fuel? Was it near an urban area? Wood makes a lot of pollution you know…

Danita, dear, nice to see you called out for working your BDS into the proceedings. I would like to add a little hint– Mr. Obama is not personally responsible for everything that gets done by his administration, good or bad. I do not think he personally undertook to rewrite those web pages himself. Yes, it happened under his watch. Yes, it is a good thing (well, if it did actually result in more unprepared people heading to college, it would be a bad thing, but I am seriously skeptical of the claim that there were more than a handful of folks who were deterred from going to college over the difficulties of filing a fafsa form.) So does that mean you’ll now give Bush credit for the many small, relatively unimportant things that happened on his watch (for small and unimportant is what this is)? doubt it, as you don’t even want to give him credit for big things like increased AIDS funding to Africa.

BDS?

Broadcast Data Systems?
I guess no one is going to help me out here.

“I have been trying to promote a standard based on dry feed corn”
And how would an atypical standard like this be adopted? Would it be by universal agreement? I assume that you would object to it being legislated.

The only cost would be the reverse shipping of the local product to the nearest distribution center, and the management of the records.

“I think it should be legislated if the United States is to survive into the next century.”
I have to admit I’m no economist so I can’t tell if you’re pulling my leg, but I haven’t heard of anything like this except maybe the old Colonial scrip. I’ve got to hand it to you though: At least you’re trying to think ahead!

Although I don’t agree with all the proposals, I believe that simplifying the student aid process is vital for making college more accessible.

There is more than one benefit to a base of feed-corn. It is fairly easily convertible to solar-units, fuel units, electrical units, food units (meat, fruit et al), labor units, and all those as both input and output. A ‘solar unit’, though it follows along the same lines, is difficult to define and subject to change.

Well if you can figure out how to make the solar unit work you might be on to something that lots of green enthusiasts would go for. Feed corn is going to be a tough sell–most people don’t see any intrinsic value in it.

But by then it will be too late to preserve the constitution.

Wouldn’t a farmer(and I’m not a farmer) in a small area like to see at how much corn a woodsman would trade a cord of wood, and compare that to the dollar prices? How much of that value would he trade to get the taxable dollars back again, when his wife needs them to go to Wal-Mart?

“Too many students who qualify found applying for student loans was too difficult to understand,”
Are they kidding? They do mean for college, right?

I do not remember the FAFSA form to be “difficult”; I remember it to be time consuming if anything. However, I can easily justify spending 10-20mins filling out a form that will grant me 10’s of thousands’ of dollars for my education. In what ways are they planning on simplifying the questions? If one finds answering 150 questions to be too difficult, then typical college work load of reading 100+ pages a night will undoubtedly pose as a “problem” to these potential students. Likewise, if people cannot figure out how to fill out an online form, how can we trust the same people to figure out how to pay back their loans on time? Aren’t we as a country in enough debt? Attending college is a test of your stamina, time management skills, as well as a finical responsibility. While I agree that college level education should be available for those who are interested; I do not believe that simplifying the FAFSA form will fix any problem. The problem lies within pre-college education. Invest in High School courses geared towards educating students on how to fill out these forms, open a savings account, apply to fitting universities, etc. Infest in teaching young students the responsibility of post High School graduation, in whatever they may go on to achieve. Continuing an education may not be everyone’s cup ‘o tea; live and let live, but set the bar high enough for young adults to feel prepared to handle the difficulty that a 4 year college degree entails. Fix the real problem, because it’s rooted deeper than a 150 question tax bracket form.

With all the things we are being told we “HAVE TO DO NOW”, this is one that…
A. DOES NOT EVEN NEED TO BE DONE.
B. WOULD COST MORE TO IMPLEMENT & DEAL WITH THE CHANGES THAN ANY SAVINGS ANYONE CAN “CLAIM” WOULD OCCUR.
The info on the form is the fundamental data required to determine aid. It does not however take into account your debt situation. Only your assests.
If any changes were to occur, I would recommend that more data on your debt be included.

JoAnn, thanks for saying something with which I wholeheartedly agree– the FAFSA was not that complicated in the first place. I am a college professor and I have filled out FAFSA forms for years while my children went through college (and it was annoying since we knew we would not qualify for financial aid, but both children were required to fill out FAFSA anyway because of their merit scholarships– don’t ask me). They are indeed time-consuming but not complicated. If you can’t fill out a FAFSA, or gave up in frustration and didn’t go to college because it was too difficult, then I dread the thought of dealing with you in my classroom anyway.
Oh, but the other shoe has dropped. One way they intend to “simplify” things is to share IRS tax form data. The IRS commissioner said that basically the FAFSA would have a “do you want to go get your IRS data” button– sounds sorta like what TurboTax does to fill in info from your Quickbooks records when you use it to do your taxes. I am not terribly comfortable with direct access to the IRS info, although I guess if there’s an opt-in rather than an opt-out , that is marginally better. BUT it is a slippery slope– giving IRS info to other departments of the federal government– that I’d prefer to avoid.

Danita, you wrote, “Simplifying bureaucratic government forms and red tape – what a sinister left wing plot!” So if the former president, your favorite, George Bush, had proposed a change in the FAFSA application system that required the IRS to share private citizens’ tax information with another government agency as a matter of course, you would not have been concerned?
The form is relatively simple, but necessarily asks a lot of questions in order to make a reasonably accurate assessment of your financial situation in order to determine financial aid eligibility. It currently remembers information you filled in from the previous year, so once you have done it once, the amount of work involved goes down considerably. However, I am more comfortable inputting my own tax and income information than having the IRS provide it, and would much prefer the firewall between the IRS and other government entities remain in place for safety and privacy reasons.

What about people like myself who have been on their own since the age of 18? People who have to work 4 jobs and can’t afford to further their education so they get stuck in the same rut over and over again? When are we going to try and strengthen the youth who want to go to school and further their education? I have several friends/relatives who get full rides because they have children and are single mothers, Yay for them, but what about the traditional student? No children, just trying to get an education? Why in God’s earth should I have to use my parents’ tax information when I have been out of their home for 4 years?