The Free Application for Federal Student Aid - Assignment Example

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid Introduction The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the incorporated application form used by students to get financial support for completion of their education. The educational aid is in form of loans and grants. The form is used to determine the eligibility of students seeking financial aid for learning. Colleges and universities which are both public and private use it. In addition, private financial aid providers also use the FAFSA to determine whether applicants are credit worthy. FAFSA forms seeks far reaching information about the applicants’ families’ income level and tax information over the years, size of assets, family size, and number of family members in universities. Most people find this depressing and confusing. The calculation of the ability to get aid based on individuals’ financial circumstances may limit some students in getting financial aid and therefore it should be on merit and not on the size of assets owned by individuals and their families. The FAFSA form does not consider the financial challenges that most families live in and therefore most family members find it intimidating. Therefore most families and students fail to go for higher level of education like colleges, since it has over hundred questions and most of these questions are base on the financial wellbeing of parents and families. This becomes a limiting factor to students in need of financial aid. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid process faces challenges because it is ineffective in ensuring college completion by the students because of the complexities involved. Due to lack of finances enough to sponsor education sector, the organizations using the FAFSA process imposes policies that make parents to start paying immediately the students are enrolled in the loans programme. This makes poor families strain even more and hence find themselves in a bad financial situation. Proposal have been made for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form to be narrowed down to be user friendly but instead more questions were added to the already existing ones to help asses financial situations of students seeking loans and grants in or4der to finance their education. This is a challenging factor because, even if the questions are answered, it does not put into consideration of the high costs of living in various states in the nation. The fact that the accessibility of loans and grants are based on the credit worthiness according to the financial position of the families, most poor families find it hard to access financial aid to finance college education. Furthermore, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid documents are hard to interpret and understand since the form of assessment and questions might be too hard and depressing for most individuals applying for the loans (Scott). The Free Application for Federal Student Aid form should be significantly simplified without affecting the assessment of students’ ability to get loans or sponsorship. With the policies guiding loans repayment in place, the enforcers should eliminate certain questions in order to enable all students from all walks of life to apply for financial aid. Most financial questions should be removed and the total number of questions should be reduced also. This will enable the form to be user friendly and with fewer instructions so as the students applying for loans can understand effectively conditions and terms of getting financial aid from the organization. The questions relating to tax information of the parents and applicants should be dealt directly with the Internal Revenue Service so as to get information about the applicants’ eligibility for loans. This will help reduce the number of questions that the loans and grant applicants would find depressing and extreme confidentiality can be observed especially for the people with low income. The government should analyze different options to facilitate the transformation of the FAFSA for the coming generations seeking for educational financial aid. This can be done through the congress meetings so as user friendly policies should be reinstated; like the provision of grace period for those who have borrowed money. This will enable them to get financially stable and be in a position to repay the owed loans. The financial aid is based on a first come first served basis. During this financial depression period, most families especially those who are unable to finance college education go for loans offered through Free Application for Federal Student Aid and given the current status of the process of application, there is a major challenge for many poor or unable families. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid form should be revised because it is time consuming. In most cases, parents and students find it hard to complete the filling of the form in time because of the many questions based on the financial records that give information about the position of the family. Therefore parents have to take time looking for necessary documents to get the required information. This might make the students miss out on their chances of getting financial support. The system is also costly and there are increased financial constraints to most families in America. Most parents fail to understand questions involved in the documents, so they get services from other personnel who they have to pay. This is a service that is supposed to be free to all but due to complexities involved, unnecessary expenditures are incurred by parents in order to complete and submit the form in time. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms are complex and without necessary help, many applicants get tired in the process and give up. This marginalizes students who are eligible for financial aid. The situation occurs due to a situation called form fright. It results from the complexity and size of the number of questions that are to be answered in the forms. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms promote discrimination in access of public facilities. This is because the rich in the society use financial advisers to maximize in access of financial aid. The poor are not able to afford financial advisors and therefore in many situations, students from families that are struggling financially fail in getting chances to go to college simply because they were not able to complete filling the form in time. The financial advisers give relevant information based on the asset worthiness of their clients and advice them accordingly on best strategies to choose in payment of the loans. This is a service limited only to the rich since the poor are not able to afford such services, they might find themselves choosing a costly repayment plan that they are not able to maintain hence heavy financial burden on students and their families. The organizations that offer financial aid through Free Application for Federal Student Aid should propose and use strategies the are precise and accurate in assessment of students ability to pay the offered loans. The form of assessment should be simple or easy to understand for applicants. Though some of these changes will face challenges like some instituitions might create their own ways of assessing credit worthiness of students. This might increase high level of discrimination in the education sector. The education stakeholders especially the congress should remove or streamline the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Subsidized loans offered by the financial aid organizations are supposed to enable students get funding for their education without them going into a serious financial depression, but based on the current Free Application for Federal Student Aid application process, poor students are not protected from financial depression and they find themselves in high levels of debts they are unable to pay. In conclusion, the problem of financial distress to poor students is real. The financial distress results from the complicated application approach that is applied in the Free Application FSA forms that get most poor families to struggle even more in order to sustain themselves financially. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid application process should be made more simpler so that the poor families can be able to get equal access financial aid for education. Reference Scott, George A. Federal Student Aid: Highlights of a Study Group on Simplifying the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Washington: DIANE Publishing, 2010. Read More