Next to paying tuition bills, parents of college-age students dread few things more than completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, aka FAFSA. So it would seem to be good news that the Education Department this month is rolling out a new and supposedly simpler form. But government makes nothing free or simple.
Rather than pass legislation after hearings with a floor vote, Congress slipped a FAFSA redesign into the December 2020 omnibus spending bill. But the legislation doesn’t merely streamline the form. It also expands Pell grant eligibility and changes rules in ways that will harm middle-class students while encouraging families to game the system.
The new FAFSA reduces the number of questions to about three dozen in part by pulling information from student and parent tax returns at the Internal Revenue Service. This information will be plugged into a new formula to calculate a “student aid index,” which determines how much families could afford to contribute to a child’s college education.
According to the Education Department, 1.5 million more students will be able to access the maximum Pell award, which is $7,395 this year. But the new formula will also result in many middle-class families paying much more for college.