Updates to Financial Aid Process Makes Application Easier
By: Ashlyne Wilson and Alexis Oswald.
College students will have an easier way to fill out their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form with the Simplifying Financial Aid for Students Act of 2015. With this act, students enrolling in the 2017/2018 academic year can fill out their FAFSAs in October, and will be able to receive earlier estimates of their financial aid and the opportunity to get first-come, first-serve financial aid.
This will give them extra time before the May 1 final college decision deadline to make better financial and academic decisions.
According to a statement released by the White House, because of the current financial aid system, “an estimated two million students who are enrolled in college and would be eligible for a Pell Grant never applied for aid, and an unknown number failed to enroll in college because they did not know that aid is available.”
The Simplifying Act will make filling out the FAFSA easier and more accurate by basing the financial aid eligibility from the “prior-prior” tax year and pulling the tax information directly from the IRS data retrieval tool on the IRS website.
Below is a document by the U.S. Department of Education outlining the FAFSA changes.
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By using the tax information from two years prior to the current academic year, students can complete the FAFSA earlier, submit more accurate tax information, and get early notification about financial aid eligibility.
Sylvia Bustard, associate director of the Kent State University Financial Aid Office, said that this new system will help financial aid administrators of all universities to push the financial aid packages out quicker and counsel students about their options for paying for college.
“Financial aid administrators are in a really tight spot. Since we have to wait for the new annual year in January to complete the FAFSA, it leaves a very small window for students to complete the FAFSA and to know what their eligibility is to make a decision before the May 1st decision deadline,” she said. “[The new system] really allows a longer period of time for the financial aid administrators to get the financial aid packages out earlier and be able to have more time to counsel students about what type of financial aid they were awarded. Then the students can make better decisions about which college they can afford to attend.”
The verification process is another huge problem on financial aid administrators. This process occurs when the school requires all of the tax information from the household to check the accuracy of the FAFSA information. This process can take long periods of time and halts the awarding process until the process is complete. In fact, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), co-sponsor for the Simplifying Act, calls the verification process “a significant drain on financial aid offices and the source of the biggest burden associated with regulatory compliance.”
He also says in his press release that with the new FAFSA system, using the prior-prior data retrieval method would allow students, the government and universities the power to use “more accurate information and simplify the verification process to ensure taxpayer dollars are appropriately spent.” The verification process will be virtually wiped away in within a few years of this act.
Jasmine Perry, a dance major at Kent State from Baltimore, was selected for verification before and said that by time the process was completed, she had missed out on some financial aid. Alexis Oswald has more in her audio story.
“I have been selected for verification and that process takes a long time because they want you to get your full tax report and when you go into the IRS website sometimes it’s down and that causes a longer wait for your financial aid to come in,” she said. “You’re just waiting and then sometimes you can be kicked out of that pool of students who needs those grants. I was one of those students kicked out of that pool.”
Perry said that she is excited for the new FAFSA update because now students will have three extra months to save money once they are aware of how much aid they are getting from the government.
“I think more students will have a chance to go to college and be able to get the financial aid they thought wouldn’t be available to them,” she said. “It’ll be easier for more students to finish college and pursue more productive lives.”