Do you think it's stupid that your fafsa is based on your parents' income?

Paying for College
21

What I really think is wrong about FASFA is that there are many factors of a parent’s income it doesn’t take into consideration. First, it only asks about the past year’s income. My husband and I had a tough time getting through the recession. We are professionals in the private sector but for years we were just holding onto jobs, not getting raises and certainly not making the money we are now. This didn’t leave us years of our current income to save for college. It also doesn’t take into consideration what you have to pay for healthcare. Since the ACA we are paying a small fortune in deductibles and premiums yet our friends who work in the public system still have affordable plans. Finally, it doesn’t ask if you are responsible for your own retirement. Some have pensions…we don not. Every cent of our future depends on what we can save now. So do we pay for college or buy healthcare? Do we pay for college or save for our retirement? Oh, and then there’s the fact that if dh and I divorced we would do better on the FASFA. So should we stay married or get a divorce to better afford college? The system stinks!

I don’t think the OP wants a free ride. The OP is pointing out that the FASFA system isn’t a good one. Perhaps parents don’t want to pay at all? What is a student to do? Not go to college until s/he is considered independent from parents? There is no law that state parents have to pay for kid’s college.

22

Empire, the financial hit you would take in getting a divorce is typically several times greater than the modest upside you would see in financial aid. Do the math- your salaries supporting TWO households- even a modest rental for the spouse who moves out. Divorce for many people means the end of financial security even if they were living a comfortable life while married.

All this for an extra few thousand dollars a year in financial aid? Wow. Short term thinking.

23

I’m definitely not in favor of a system where the government has even more direct say in how a person should spend his or her own money. The government overreach and intrusiveness described here borders on tyranny, in my opinion.

24

Yes, I think the system is pretty “fair” in that it tries to keep all the goodies from going to the families of the wealthy, whose children have had huge advantages their whole educational lives. It may not always succeed.

Systems like Europe’s are nice, but they require a much higher tax burden (something Americans really aren’t going to support) and limit the number of students who can enroll. Think about it. If your state options were the only options, how many fewer would go to college simply because there was only so much room. And then what happens to the selectivity of admissions? In this country, at least (maybe Europe’s found a work-around), the system would amount to a huge benefit for the wealthy as we know there’s a strong correlation between test scores and wealth. And how to students get into those free universities in other countries? High stakes tests.

25

@Empireapple You seem to misunderstand how financial aid works if you think you’d be better off divorced. FAFSA doesn’t award anything but spell grants and govt loans. Each school decides how they calculate financial aid and very few limit their inquiry to the FAFSA, requiring non-custodial parent financial information. As a result, students who can get into schools with generous financial aid but uncooperative non-custodial parents usually can’t afford expensive colleges. Their EFC is often higher than what the custodial parent can afford since it expects both parents to contribute.

26

For those touting European systems, as pointed out in this thread, those are often no frills and better schools are highly competitive. We have no frills community colleges at low costs and even free in some states and students don’t want to attend them. We have combined a sense of entitlement and caviar taste.

  • What do you mean I can’t afford NYU or UCLA OOS? That’s not fair!
27

@Empireapple DH and I are in the exact same boat - In 2016 we paid out 15% of our gross income in Health Care Premiums for DH/DD this did not include Deductibles or my costs thru my employer, this was just for checks I wrote to the insurance provider. Like you, recession was tough, retirement is not looking too good and one kid left to educate. DD must go after merit, there are no other choices, the EFC is a fricking joke.

Personally, I think the cost of attendance has gotten ridiculous, loans should be available to the students without the parents on the hook for a Parent Plus or to co-sign on loans. Kids would have to think a little harder about taking out those loans if they knew there was no parent backup. I also think that the loans should do away with the deferment to follow graduation and implement a small mandatory monthly payment to remind the borrowers that they owe funds for the educational experience they are currently enjoying forcing most students to work a little while in college like most of us did “back in the day” when working ones way through college was actually a possible thing.

28

I think students used to be able to borrow more, without their parents, which caused a high number of default.

29

Most students getting financial aid are doing work study or otherwise working during the school year and summers to cover their educational expenses. Allowing students to get large student loans without a co-signer would result in a huge percentage of defaults. The problem isn’t the financial aid system but the astronomical cost of education these days.

30

Students have never been able to borrow more than the current limits for undergrad. In fact, they could only borrow $2,625/year in the late 80’s … tuition was much lower, but not that low at many schools. It has been a struggle for the dependent student to pay for college on his/her own for many years (if it ever really was “easy” - I know that I chose a co-op school in the 70’s expressly because I couldn’t afford other 4 year sleep-away schools on my own).

The truth is that there is no money tree, and the limited amount of federal aid must be divvied up on as equitable a basis as possible. No formula will be perfect - some will get the shaft (that family earning a few extra dollars that puts them out of Pell range may lose out on Pell & institutional aid they may have received had they earned a bit less), and some will hit the jackpot (the family with the business that loses money on paper who gets a Pell grant but can afford to live in a big house on a lake). The system has to ignore the outliers to try to help the most and the most needy.

And because there is only a limited amount of aid to go around, the family needs to be expected to assist. They have every right to choose not to do so, of course - but at least they have that choice. I worked at a large urban university with students from families that would have loved to have had the option of choosing whether or not to assist their child with college costs … but they didn’t even have enough to afford adequate food and housing.

31

In OP’s same logic, it is not students’ faults to be born from poor parents. Obviously FA should go to those who need more help because they have less access.

32

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Naive

If we followed other western countries, many of our high school students wouldn’t be allowed to have a funded college education. They would have been long ago tracked away from college prep. So wanting their system would not be American

33

Higher education in many countries is limited to kids who pass a test given in the 8th grade who then get tracked to a university-training HS program.

Everyone else can study cake decorating or learn to become a hair stylist in a vocational training program.

34

Even if the FAFSA were based on student income, the highest award is only about $5,000. That’s not going to cover the costs of residential college at all. Of course, even if FAFSA rules changed it wouldn’t affect how private colleges calculate their EFC. Students who can’t count on help from their parents would still be limited primarily to commuter schools.

35

@BelknapPoint wrote: “I’m definitely not in favor of a system where the government has even more direct say in how a person should spend his or her own money. The government overreach and intrusiveness described here borders on tyranny, in my opinion.”

Note that this system is actually child support enforcement, which I understand US authorities tend to be much more draconian about than many other industrialised countries.

The difference to the US is merely the cutoff point: not a fixed age between 18 and 21 according to state law + high school graduation, but an education that enables the child to support themselves according to their interests and capabilities, necessitating a qualification beyond high school. Which can mean finishing trade school at 18 or getting a masters at 27 (Yes, I agree that the latter is ridiculous, but these are cases I have come across). The student has obligations, too: consulting the parents, keeping them informed about grades, remaining in good academic standing and graduating in a reasonable time frame. Once a student has gained their first post high school qualification, the parents are usually off the hook. The student can always keep going for higher qualifications by applying for government aid as an independent, though, the government has a rather harder time getting off the hook than the parents have.

36

@blossom, @mom2collegekids, I wonder which countries you are talking about and where you are getting your information from? Because I am aware of no system that works like that these days. If you look at tertiary education graduation rates of younger adults rates in OECD countries, they hover around 40 to 50% for most of them, and while the US is rather closer to 50%, the differences are not that stark. (Looking at older adults, that’s where the picture changes).

And even in systems with tracking, is isn’t that anyone is not allowed to go on to higher education by being tracked away from it and somehow forcibly kept away. The numbers of students gaining alternative tertiary entrance qualifications is steadily climbing, in some countries approaching college prep track numbers. Again, the system may look very different on the surface in that respect, but in essence it boils down to the fact that no matter how many chances a system offers, at some point you do have to pass algebra 2.

37

Sorry, forgot to add the link for anyone who’s interested:
https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/population-with-tertiary-education.htm#indicator-chart

38

I was one of those who touted the Euro college system.

Yes, I am 100% ok with limiting college to those who can pass X test and I’m fine with a mostly no-frills college experience. Maybe if we limit college back to those who actually need additional training for their field, we’ll stop the stupid credentials creep.

39

I have cousins who in fact have been tracked OUT of college prep HS’s and into vocational programs due to learning challenges-- the kind which are easily dealt with in the US. A genius level math student by middle school (who had reading difficulties- here he’d have been in a “twice exceptional” program and mainstreamed by 9th grade) who is a bookkeeper. A bright and ambitious student who is finishing a welding program (not that there is anything wrong with that) who scored off the charts on a standard IQ test but who has ADD. And his younger brother who will likely end up in a pharm tech certification program (also very bright, also with ADD) because he didn’t score high enough to get into the prestigious HS which tracks to university which tracks to pharmaceutical research which is his interest.

Don’t tell me that kids aren’t tracked away from university. These are upper middle class kids growing up in families which value education (many PhD’s, university professors, engineers) who just can’t pass the hurdle (whether in 8th grade, 9th, or in one country, 12th) which gets them access to a college education.

Does America want every kid with an LD or ADD screened out of college? And these are kids who have NO difficulty passing algebra 2- the “family” disability appears to be language based, the kind of issue which any solid special Ed teacher from Bank Street or NYU could deal with in two years. (which in fact is what has happened with the other family members who live in the US. Intervention in the early years and then mainstreamed, reading on grade level or above, by middle school).

40

Not touting a system here (do you want me to count the ways in which I consider the system broken in which I am currently moving?), merely making an observation on cultural and legal differences I find interesting. (I’m a lawyer, an education wonk and working in international student finance).

But insisting that educational hurdles in countries which subsidise higher education more than others exist in order to deliberately and artificially limit the number of students going on to higher education to save their budgets, simply isn’t true and isn’t borne out by the numbers.

And seriously, screening out twice exceptional children is the last thing that’s going to make a financial impact.
@blossom, you’re shifting goal posts here - I’m completely with you on that the ignorance surrounding learning disabilities and dual exceptionalities in most countries which aren’t the US and the UK is scandalous (and trust me, I know whereof I speak).

However, twice exceptional kids are just about the tiniest subset of the student population to use as an example, by definition a fraction of the 2% of students with gifted level IQs - as anecdotal as evidence gets, really. And it’s not as if programs for twice exceptional children are a dime a dozen anywhere, the population is simply too tiny to support a program in all but major cities.

So a student who has an untreated learning disability such as ADHD did not score high enough on a test to get him into his desired school? In most industrialised countries, this would be considered a medical/psychiatric issue first, an educational issue second. In reality, it should be both - but it’s not an issue of funding higher education. (And I am assuming the pharm tech program is a tertiary program the government is at least partially funding, too). And are you sure that none of the students in the US that are kept out of four year colleges because they score below whatever is considered college readiness on the ACT or SAT have an unrecognised and/or untreated learning disability? Please do not get hung up on my using “pass algebra 2” as a metaphor - the idea is that there are hurdles to pass because educational establishments screen by demanding students show their qualifications, all over the world, and it appears to work out, on aggregate, to about similar numbers of college graduates (at least in the current generation) in most industrialised countries. But statistically, in every system, some otherwise deserving students will fall through some crack.

Some students, somewhere in Europe, will be kept out of college or drop out due an untreated learning disability. Some students, somewhere in the US, will too. Some students, somewhere in the US, will be kept out of college or have to drop out due to lack of funds.
Some students, somewhere in Europe, will drop out due to the impersonality and the lack of personal attention at an underfunded, overcrowded public commuter school.

None of which is fair.
However, I posit that any hurdle that has no relevance to the students person but merely to what whatever type of family the student happens to be born into is the most unfair of all.