A couple of times in the last couple of weeks I have heard a lot about how there is a desperate need in this country to make it easier to apply for financial aid for college. Apparently the financial aid form is 8 pages long. The form asks a lot of personal questions. It's complicated. The idea out there, supported by Clinton, is to knock it down to a page. Maybe an automatic thing based on tax returns. This is fine, I guess, but really, is the idea that some potential students are discouraged from attending college because they are daunted by an 8 page form? At the risk of being over-the-top, I'm willing to say that if an 8-page form prevents you from applying, maybe you're not ready for college just yet.
And while I'm here, I just listened to a speech by Hillary Clinton in which she asserts that there are great numbers of potential students who are not going to college because they can't afford it. It used to be that college cost was expensive, but incomes were high enough that anyone could afford it and everyone went. When was this time, exactly? Aren't enrollments at all-time highs? Didn't college used to be comparatively cheap? Not saying, of course, that college should be more affordable or that people aren't choosing not to go based on costs, but still, these facts are wrong, no?
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I don't think the problem with the FASFA is that it is 8 pages long (or whatever), but how unbelievably complex it is. I was lucky in that I did not have to apply for student loans until grad school, but when I completed the form for the first time it took HOURS to complete. It requires so much data from so many different sources. I was an adult and accustomed to doing my own taxes, etc., so the process wasn't completely foreign to me...but it was the most intensively bureaucratic process I had ever encountered at the time. I don't think the issue is that 17 year olds can't comprehend the forms (if that were the case, you're right--maybe college isn't for them), but that it could be discouraging to applicants--i.e. screw this, I can't find all this information, so why bother?
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