Budget proposal, Senate bill aim to simplify FAFSA application process

Applying for student aid felt like filing a tax return for Dominic Delzompo, a third-year vocal performance student.

Students have to answer more than 100 questions, including one asking them whether they are convicted of possessing or selling illegal drugs while receiving student aid.

Delzompo said he had to ask his parents for their financial information.

“It makes me terrified to do (my own) taxes,” Delzompo said. “(There is) a lot to dig through.”

President Barack Obama and a bipartisan group of U.S. senators are attempting to streamline the financial aid application process.

The recent proposals, one in the form of a Senate bill and another in the form of a provision in Obama’s budget, would reduce the number of questions on students’ financial aid applications and would aim to make it easier for students and families to submit tax information.

Many students in the U.S. fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, a federal government form, to receive their financial aid.

About 20,600 UCLA undergraduates, or about 70 percent of those who enrolled during the 2014-2015 year, submitted a FAFSA form, said Ronald Johnson, director of UCLA’s Financial Aid Office. Fifty-six percent of UCLA undergraduates received financial aid as of fall 2014.

Obama’s proposal calls for deleting up to 30 questions from FAFSA regarding assets and additional types of income, such as savings, investments and net worth.

The proposal comes after a group of senators introduced a bill called Financial Aid Simplification and Transparency Act last month. The measure would replace FAFSA with a single postcard that would include just a few questions about family size and household income.

The bill also calls for letting students in their junior year of high school know how much federal aid they are entitled to while they are in college.

FAFSA currently asks more than 100 questions, but students are able to skip many of the less pertinent ones using its “skip-logic” feature. This feature allows an applicant to skip questions that do not apply to them based on their answers to previous questions.

However, Chul Woo Park, a third-year Asian American studies student, said filling out the application was cumbersome for him.

“It was too much information (to fill out),” Park said. “I had to ask my mom and dad’s incomes and everything.”

The Obama administration has already simplified the application process by allowing students to upload their tax information electronically onto FAFSA through the Internal Revenue Service Data Retrieval Tool. The feature has been available since the 2009-2010 school year.

But many applicants are not able to take advantage of this feature, since early February is the earliest the tool is available. The option also requires applicants to have filed their most recent tax return.

According to Department of Education figures, four million people could not use the data retrieval tool last year because the FAFSA deadline occurred before most filed their taxes, said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access & Success.

Some have raised concerns that reducing the FAFSA application to a couple of questions would create a false sense of simplicity in students’ finances.

Though Johnson supports cutting some questions from the application, he said he thinks two questions, as proposed by the Senate bill, are not enough to make an adequate evaluation of families’ financial aid eligibilities.

Johnson said he thinks this would lead to state financial aid agencies and colleges to have their own financial aid applications, defeating the purpose of simplification. Instead, he said he supports prior income reporting allowing families to provide financial information from two years prior.

Despite the length of the application, some students said they didn’t have a hard time filling it out.

Nathaniel Vasquez Farley, a second-year history student, said he was able to quickly fill out FAFSA because working for an accountant gave him experience with receipts, 1040 forms and W-2s. Still, he said he understands how it can be challenging for others.

He said it took him about an hour to fill out the FAFSA the first time, but it got progressively easier afterward.

In a U.S. Senate floor speech last month, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) said he hopes to bring the bill to the floor for debate by this spring.

Contributing reports by Ian Stevenson and Sarah Hambro, Bruin contributors.