Many college students and their families are calling for a simpler Free Application for Federal Student Aid, saying it is overly complicated and impersonal.
Maria Wallace, a College of Arts and Sciences sophomore, said she has never helped her parents fill out the FAFSA, but she thinks the form and process need to be amended to take special financial cases into account.
‘I think a lot of times there are extenuating circumstances,’ Wallace said. ‘My brother is handicapped and my mom can’t work. That’s obviously an extenuating circumstance.’
Wallace is one of many calling for changes to the form, which is used to determine a family’s expected college tuition contribution to calculate a student’s eligibility for financial aid.
She said the form should be less generic and more flexible to individual students’ needs.
‘I feel like it’s too impersonal,’ she said. ‘[If it wasn’t], people wouldn’t be as intimidated by the FAFSA.’
Joanne Sherrick of Jewett City, Conn., the parent of a high school senior, said she also thinks the form needs more information.
‘They show how much money you’re making, but there is no account for how much your bills are,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t ask how much your mortgage is.’
Sherrick said despite her complaints about form, filling it out was not a negative experience.
‘I didn’t think it was so bad,’ she said. ‘It might be a pain in the neck because it’s time consuming, but if you do your income tax, then it’s pretty straightforward.’
Veronica Wicks, a senior at Kings Park High School who is hoping to attend Boston University, said because her parents work nine-hour days, it was hard to find time to fill out the form.
‘We heard from other families that they did not get a lot of money back,’ she said. ‘We decided that it was not even worth filling out. I guess if they made it more user-friendly we might have filled it out.’
Student Financial Aid Services Inc. spokeswoman Mary Fallon said that her organization runs fafsa.com, a website that guides users through the form. The website checks for errors through an intensive 450-point error detector computer program and then checks each answer in person.
‘ ‘Some [customers] say it takes five hours [to fill out a form],’ Fallon said in an email. ‘When we do it, we can do it in 20 minutes – that’s before we check it over.’
The service costs $79.99 for an online consultation and $100 for a phone consultation, but Fallon said the services are worth it.
‘It’s a lot to think about,’ she said. ‘That’s why people come to professionals, because it gets to be too much of a headache.’
BU Financial Assistance Executive Director Christine McGuire said in email that FAFSA difficulties are not from the actual form, but come as a result of Expected Family Contribution. The federal government uses the form to collect required information to calculate a student’s eligibility for federal benefits, she said.
‘The form itself just collects data,’ she said. ‘What is really at issue behind ‘FAFSA simplification’ is how this federal formula is calculating the EFC.’
Sherrick said she will complete the FAFSA for her son regardless of any complications, with the hope that it will help finance his education.
‘Everybody we talked to said we should,’ she said. ‘It’s worth it, just in case.’
null • Aug 3, 2010 at 2:21 pm
All the noise about the fafsa being so difficult is just whining quite frankly. If your parents cant do it, handle it yourself, and if you find this process so difficult, I think BU will more than likely be more than you can handle as well.<br/>Have your banking statements and income taxes handy, thats all you need, and the process is as simple as any other application you will ever fill out. It may not be comfortable revealing so much information about yourself, but your looking for money, some sacrifice must be made.<br/>And no, theres no place where your asked how much your mortgage is, its up to you how you spend your own money. Financial aid isnt there to pay your mortgage, or subsidize your lifestyle choices, but if as mentioned in the atrticle, you have extenuating circumstances, like a handicapped child, there are ample opportunities to make comments on such conditions. The girl who spoke to the lack of that admittedly never filled out the form herself, and that was made obvious by her comment.<br/>Finally, to pay a service 80 to 100 bucks to fill out this form. If you can afford to pay such a price for something that you can do yourself with just a bit of effort and time, you dont deserve financial aid.