When Lyndsey found out about her acceptance to the University of Washington, she was thrilled and filled with excitement about the four years to come. But then my 17-year-old friend from home discovered it would cost her more than $30,000 per year to be a Husky. Lyndsey’s family couldn’t foot the bill, which meant she spent her New Year’s Eve filling out the FAFSA instead of watching fireworks. That’s where her troubled adventure in federal financial aid began.
The Department of Education is the largest provider of financial aid for college students in the United States through a branch known as the Federal Student Aid. At the beginning of each year, the FSA opens an application for families in need of financial assistance. This is known as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or the FAFSA. More than $150 billion in federal grants and loans are allocated to more than 15 million college and career school students. A seemingly effective system, the FAFSA is a flawed way to evaluate the financial aid needs of millions of students attending college.
The FAFSA requires financial information from the student and the student’s parents. This information includes annual income, taxes paid, and assets. The application also requires demographic information such as family size, the number of students in college, and the student’s enrollment status.
A few weeks after a student fills out the 100-question FAFSA, the FSA evaluates the information to determine how much a family can contribute to its student’s tuition.
Lyndsey’s parents were divorced, so she filed all of her financial information under her dad because had the lowest annual income. Her FAFSA response projected that she would have most of her tuition paid through financial aid. University of Washington gave Lyndsey the “Husky Promise Scholarship,” UW’s full-tuition need-based scholarship. Lyndsey finished her freshman year debtless.
But that summer her dad remarried. Lyndsey filled out her next FAFSA form with this new information and quickly lost her “Husky Promise.” She was no longer “dependent” on one person’s income but two. Although this didn’t change her combined family income, the FAFSA and the University of Washington saw two people supporting Lyndsey and left tuition costs to her family.
The government’s well-intentioned involvement in financial aid fails to serve the needs of students in a predictable, reasonable way. Even the 100 questions on the FAFSA form can’t reach a sufficient understanding of a family’s financial situation. The government is not wrong in trying to narrow down who really needs taxpayer money to pay for college. But the money gets lost in the bureaucracy; attempting to categorize need in such a way leads to insufficiency and failure.
Privatized applications such as the CSS Profile conducted by the College Board have come closer to tackling the menacing task in conducting financial aid. Although the CSS Profile charges a fee to submit the form to colleges, institutions that use the CSS Profile have billions of dollars to offer in scholarship funds, beyond the scope of what the government can provide.
The CSS Profile asks questions specific as what kind of car you drive, whether your family is in debt, and if you are paying for your mother-in-law’s medical bills. Many of the 400 colleges that use the CSS Profile will include additional questions of their own to better the financial aid staff’s professional judgment of a student’s need.
The FAFSA report did not reveal that Lyndsey’s dad lost his job or that his wife’s paycheck went to medical bills. It held Lyndsey responsible for her parent’s bills and responsible for her college tuition. Why should we continue such an expensive, broken system when institutions such as the College Board embarrass the FSA?
In 1986, the Hillsdale College Board of Trustees made the decision to refuse financial aid from the federal government. Hillsdale College would sustain itself from private funding. And though challenging, it has worked. According to the Financial Aid Director for the college, Rich Moeggenberg, Hillsdale College is a strong model — in fact, the only model — of how to operate an institution purely off of private funding.
The federal government has a specific formula that defines need, but Hillsdale College works hard to find what true need is, and that varies from person to person. The margin of error is too great to determine need with a formulaic application, and the freedom to practice the professional judgment used by Moeggenberg and the Hillsdale financial aid staff should be a service offered to every college student. But colleges are stuck in the federal funding system, and with money freely flowing, there’s no incentive to change.
Perhaps the federal government should attempt, as it does, to help students with financial burdens. But federal financial aid needs a closer look, and likely an entire overhaul. We need fair and thorough evaluation beyond what a piece of paper can offer. We can’t let students like Lyndsey get lost in the black and white bureaucracy of the FSA.