Much like many Americans, I’m starting to feel the pressure of the April 15 tax deadline. Thankfully, though, this year I don’t also have to rely on that same tax information to fill out the forms necessary to apply for federal student financial aid.
I say thankfully because filing my Free Application for Federal Student Aid report has always been such a pain in the rear end. Not only was I required to provide the information from my own income tax report for the previous year, but I also needed my mom’s information.
This was because according to the government, I am considered a dependent student. Even though I am 23 years old, have lived outside of my mom’s home for two years and have filed my income taxes as an independent for the last three years, my mother’s income is used to determine my need for financial aid.
The FAFSA is available for all undergraduate students to fill out at the beginning of each year. It’s beneficial for students to file their FAFSA reports as early as possible, because money is awarded on a first-come, first-served basis.
Every year since I began attending college, I raced to make sure my mom’s and my income taxes were filed as close to the beginning of January as possible. My mom isn’t exactly computer savvy, so I’d always have to find time between our busy schedules for us to get together and complete the forms online.
Because of the changes in the filing process, it would make sense for a person to only be required to submit their own income information for the government to decide how much aid they should be eligible for. The government, however, sees things differently.
The FAFSA’s Web site features an entire worksheet that is supposed to determine a student’s dependency status. The worksheet consists of questions such as, “On or after July 1, 2009, were you homeless or were you at risk of being homeless?” and “At any time since you turned age 13, were both your parents deceased, were you in foster care or were you a dependent or ward of the court?”
In many instances, the questions in no conceivable way could be used to determine the dependency status of applicants on a case-by-case basis.
If that wasn’t enough, the FAFSA also attempts to define parents’ roles in funding their children’s education.
One section of the form instructs students that the following reasons are not good enough to refrain from providing parental information: “Your parents do not want to provide their information on your FAFSA, your parents refuse to contribute to your college expenses, your parents do not claim you as a dependent on their income taxes or you do not live with your parents.”
None of those reasons is sufficiently applicable to all students across the board.
From a young age, I have known that I would be responsible for paying for my college education. I will be the first member of my immediate family to graduate from college, and there were many times when my family did not have enough money to pay the electricity bill on time and put something away for my college education.
I began working at age 14, doing the best I could to find a way to pay for my own college education someday, and that is mainly why I feel the FAFSA is unfair. My mom always wanted to assist me in any way she possibly could, including helping me pay for school, but she never had much to give to me.
After five long years, I will graduate from UH with a Bachelor of Arts in print journalism and a Bachelor of Music in oboe performance. I have consistently worked three to four part-time jobs throughout that time and after my first full year, have taken between 18 and 22 hours each semester.
Although I have been awarded some financial assistance through the FAFSA program, I feel as though I could have been helped a lot more had my case been assessed by a real person as opposed to an online form.
I guarantee that I’m not the only one.
Callie Thompson is a journalism senior and may be reached at [email protected]
The federal government’s position is that it is the parent’s responsibility to fund a college education. This can be seen with its loan programs. Parent college loans have no limits up to the cost of an education; student loans have yearly limits, regardless of those costs. There is no subsidized parent loan, even for students who have subsidized loans themselves, based on their parent’s information. If financial aid was based only on the student’s info, many more students would qualify for Pell grants (and put the program in an even deeper hole).