Before FAFSA was redesigned in the last couple years, there was good research that there were literally millions of students who would be eligible for federal and potentially state and institutional aid, but never completed the FAFSA. It was too complex, they didn’t know about it — there’s a lot of reasons.
This had been an issue for a long time. [Former senator] Lamar Alexander deserves a lot of credit. He had a lot of desire to simplify this process so it’d be easier and more accessible — many more families would be able to complete it, and it would open up college to more low-income students. When he was on his way to retire, in 2019, there were two congressional bills about FAFSA simplification. The question was, “Can we take this cumbersome, 100-plus question form process” — a lot of it was taking data from your tax returns and figuring out field 38 needs to go here, and a family inputting it and potentially making mistakes — “and make it easier?”
There would be logic built into it. Think of TurboTax— when they find some information on you, they say, “These six questions are no longer relevant, so you no longer need to ask them.” The single biggest breakthrough was this was going to pull data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Santi, you did a tax return hopefully?