by Chris Bodenner
An expert weighs in:
As you can see from my email signature, I do financial aid for a living and have done so for 20 years. There are two issues I want to touch on with regard to that post, and I’ll take them one at a time.
First, the new FAFSA is the greatest innovation in student aid in the last 20 years. Hands down. There is nothing at all complicated about it and the Time article is full of shit. I give a FAFSA completion workshop for parents and students every year, so I know of what I speak. The current FAFSA takes the average low- or middle-income student/parent about 15 minutes to complete, especially if they use the wonderful DRT (data retrieval tool) from the IRS. The questions in Section I that were highlighted in that article only need explained once and the vast majority of parents and students will answer $0 to almost all of them. If they go to a similar workshop the first year, they will never need help again. In fact, attendance at my workshops have decreased over the last 2-3 years since the DRT was implemented because the form has become so easy to complete.
For the critics who think there is anything “complicated” about the current FAFSA, they should direct their ire at Congress. It is because of their rules for federal student aid that those questions are there and they cannot be gathered through IRS documentation. Instead of criticizing what the Department of Education cannot change, they should yell at the people who created the situation or, at the very least, provide the DoE with solutions. Good luck with that.
Second, I have no sympathy whatsoever for the reader who wrote in whining about having to try to hide or sell assets in order to pay for college. He or she is very, very, very lucky to have enough assets to play games with regarding a child’s education. Isn’t this why parents make investments and build savings? So a rich parent has to move some of his/her vast piles of money around and has a vacation home that is counted among the parent assets? Big freakin’ deal. Try being a single parent living on minimum wage or a two-parent family making less than $50,000 a year with two kids in college. Try being one of the foster kids who come to my campus. Or try being one of the five kids on our campus who had a primary earning parent who died this past year.
The Dish 