Financial aid forms may become simpler

With the economy reeling, the cost of a Penn tuition next year before room, board and other expenses - $34,868 - may be hard to come by. Financial-aid experts are examining ways to make the lengthy application process easier.

Sandy Baum, a member of the College Board's "Rethinking Student Aid" study group, said different amounts of information are needed from different types of aid applicants.

"You need a lot more information to distinguish among people who are more affluent and have complicated finances than you need to distinguish among people who are lower-income, just for federal aid purposes," she said.

For students with "complicated finances" applying to more expensive, private schools like Penn, Baum said, an extensive amount of information is inevitably required and is gathered through the College Board's Profile form.

The Profile was changed to an "adaptive" online format several years ago, eliminating questions that don't pertain to specific financial situations, Baum said, but that was as simple as it was going to get.

For determining federal-aid eligibility, Baum said, the best step would be eliminating the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and obtaining information through channels like tax records - though the information would not be "exactly identical" to what the FAFSA provides, it is "pretty close," she said.

But Penn's Student Financial Services director Bill Schilling said there was an obvious trade-off between the length of the form and the accuracy of predictions of students' need.

"One of the things we need to be careful of is that when you simplify and when you ask for less information, you lose something in the way of equity," he said. "The less information you have, the less you can differentiate among families that may have very different financial strength."

But Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of financial-aid Web site FinAid.org, said "accuracy" could be misleading.

"You ultimately end up with more accurate results for 1 percent of the population," he said, adding that the majority of those using the form includes low-income students most in need of aid who might choose to avoid the form rather than apply for aid.

Kantrowitz said there were two ways to go about simplification - simplifying just the form itself or simplifying the formula used to calculate need.

Without adjusting the formula, he said, the form won't ever make a "meaningful impact." Instead, he advocates whittling the six-page FAFSA down to three questions - income, number of family members in the household and number of family members in college.

"You could fit the FAFSA on a postcard," he said.

Baum agreed.

"Right now, we have a long and complicated form that does not do a very good job of gathering information and distinguishing among students," she said.

Still, Schilling and Kantrowitz both pointed out, many non-federal aid providers, like states and public universities, use the FAFSA and might introduce their own forms if the FAFSA were revised drastically.

"It's going to require some leadership in convincing the states that they don't need all this information," Kantrowitz said.

The goal of simplification, Schilling said, was to "prevent the process from being a barrier itself so the student doesn't even get to the point of applying for aid."

A 2004 report by the American Council on Education estimated that 20 percent of those who failed to file a FAFSA came from "low- and moderate-income families," and from that group, approximately half would have been eligible for a federal Pell Grant.

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