New bill would make FAFSA easier to complete

A new bill passed Sept. 17 by the U.S. House of Representatives will make it easier for students to lessen rising college costs, University officials said.

The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 increases funding for the Federal Pell Grant Program and simplifies the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.

“We have about 18,000 Pell recipients at all IU campuses and about 4,500 or 4,800 in Bloomington,” Doug Wasitis, IU director of federal relations, said. “Hopefully this will allow students to pay for college and stay in college without disruption.”

If approved by the Senate and signed into law by President Obama, the bill would change the way some student loans are distributed by colleges and universities. It eliminates private lending, and federal students loans will be given out by the government’s Direct Loan Program.

Obama hailed the bill’s passage as “historic.”

“This bill will end the billions upon billions of dollars in unwarranted subsidies that we hand out to banks and financial institutions,” Obama said in a statement, “and will use that money to guarantee access to low-cost loans, and strengthen Pell Grants and Perkins Loans, which make college more affordable.”

Of an estimated $80 billion the government saves from not funding bank loans, $47 billion is put toward Pell Grants. The grants currently compete for funding with the National Institutes of Health and other government programs, but this bill would provide the Pell program with mandatory funding.

“The expansion of the Federal Pell Grant program offers a significant opportunity to high-need students interested in accelerating their undergraduate educations in order to contain their overall costs for attending college,” Susan L. Pugh, associate vice provost for enrollment management, said in an e-mail.

Under the bill, the Pell grant would be increased to $5,500 in 2010 and to $6,900 by 2019. It would also simplify the FAFSA form, a document that currently has more than 100 questions.

The FAFSA includes a detailed inquiry into applicants’ families’ ability to pay for college, but the new law would exclude several sections of questions for students who don’t meet the $150,000 “asset cap” for applying.

“Anything we can do to simplify the process, we certainly support,” Wasitis said. “I think it’s certainly on people’s minds more today than was five years ago.”