The botched FAFSA rollout made this year’s college-decision season a headache. What if we got rid of the form?
Market Watch
Jillian Berman
May 13, 2024
The bungled rollout of the new FAFSA has wreaked havoc on this year’s college-decision season, with students, families and schools scrambling to get financial aid in order before the start of the school year.
But what if there was no form? Scrapping the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, is an idea that wonks and practitioners have bandied about for years. Under the current system, students and families must fill out the form if they want to access federal aid like Pell grants and federal student loans and many states, colleges and scholarship organizations use it to hand out their own aid to students.
Now the form is under scrutiny after efforts to simplify it created more challenges. In response, states and scholarship providers are finding ways to hand out financial aid without FAFSA. Perhaps it’s time to give this radical proposal serious consideration, some experts say.
“It’s a brilliant idea,” said Faith Sandler, the executive director of the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis, which works with and funds low-income college students. “There would be multiple ways that the federal government already knows a family, or a household, or an individual, is poor.”
That’s what David Bergeron thinks. For three decades he worked at the Department of Education and the idea of getting rid of the FAFSA never crossed his mind. But once he left government, Bergeron said, he began to wonder whether our financial-aid system needs reshaping, including by scrapping the form.
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