Navigating Our Shameful, Maddeningly Complex Student Aid System -<br />This month, the federal government switched off a tool<br />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.<br />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<br />that there is often not enough aid money to make college affordable for all students who would apply or actually end up doing so.<br />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<br />that Social Security lets you know what size check you might get at retirement age.<br />data into your Fafsa, errors would be unlikely, and you would stand a much lower chance<br />of going through a noxious verification process that many students endure.<br />Before the change, applying for aid this month might have been hard, because you might not have done your 2016 tax returns yet<br />and thus would not have been able to supply accurate income data.<br />The president had campaigned on a platform of eradicating the Fafsa altogether and replacing it with a box on tax forms<br />that people could check to export data to the college aid deciders.<br />That could offer encouragement to people who might otherwise assume<br />that college is financially out of reach, simply because they don’t know how the system works.
