The report — titled “Better for Students: Simplifying the Federal Financial Aid Process” — is cast as one of a series of steps toward the foundation’s goal of eliminating the FAFSA altogether and instead relying upon existing income information provided through tax filing to determine financial aid eligibility.
The foundation predicts that an additional 2 million students will enroll in college if the three primary recommendations in its new report are adopted.
Those recommendations are to:
• Simplify the FAFSA by “sorting students according to the complexity of their financial situations and eliminating unnecessary application questions.” As the report states, “Three-quarters of all aid applicants do not have situations that would require them to file tax schedule documents (e.g., assets beyond home or retirement account, small business). These students should face the minimum number of questions.”
• Streamline the FAFSA by using tax data already provided by students to the IRS. This could be accomplished, the report says, by using the IRS Data Retrieval Tool, or DRT.
