Here’s the good news: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, website is now open 24 hours a day, seven days a week after a multi-year effort to simplify the financial aid search process. This month, I watched two high school seniors and their college counselor start the forms from scratch and submit them in just over an hour.
And here’s the weird news: The teens were able to complete the application quickly because they had both logged in as themselves, using their own username and password, and then again using their parents’ credentials (with parental permission them) to complete an important aspect of the process.
The link-up delivery was the counselor’s idea, and the parents—including a non-native English speaker and someone who works two jobs and is time-consuming and tech-savvy—were all for it, too.
But in doing so, the teenagers made a false statement that broke the law.
No one is going to jail here. But the theoretical possibility highlights the unintended consequences of trying to make things simpler. In this case, safeguards are required to protect private financial information. But any new login requirements may also trigger an urge for many families with complicated lives to bypass them.
The scene I saw—parents’ email accounts open on the counselor’s laptop to access two-factor authentication codes, printouts of tax returns in a school conference room, kids tracking their parents’ various passwords—wasn’t particularly surprising. After all, it is a prime example of the dysfunction associated with the way we pay for higher education in the United States.
Countless people have done their best over many decades to create and modify policies and systems to help low-income, first-generation college students like the couple I met get through and through college. Efforts to simplify the FAFSA — the ones that prompt parent connections — were part of an ongoing effort to make things easier.
So how did these good intentions come about in what I observed in that school boardroom this month?
The changes to the app are the product of federal legislation passed in 2020. Making things easier, as it turns out, is complicated enough that it took three years to take effect.
Even with that multi-year timeline, development of the new form — and changes to the formula for how the federal government doles out different types of financial aid — has not been smooth. The Ministry of Education’s “soft launch” on December 30 only kept the site open for short periods. The site was problematic and some parts of it were confusing people.
When I wrote a column on January 1 about my own failure to fill out the form, I received a note from a school counselor. Wanted to read more about the experience for everyday students. Fair point. So I asked him to let me look over the shoulders of his students as they made their first attempts at filling out the new form.
Families used to make a lot of mistakes on the FAFSA, especially when reporting their income. A kind of control would often ensue, leading to confusion, frustration and delays. The new app makes it easy for families to automatically transfer the correct tax information from the Internal Revenue Service.
For it all to work, however, at least one parent of a dependent student needs a separate account with their own username and password. No big deal, right? Students log in, do their thing, and then parents get pinged, log in, and do their thing.
But for counselors working with low-income families who haven’t had anyone go to college before, the process of connecting adults can be a big deal. Many parents can’t go to school meetings because they work, often two or more jobs around the clock, or they may not have great internet access. Everyone has questions – lots of them. One of the students at the school I visited kept calling her mother when she couldn’t answer questions on the form or from her counselor.
In the real world, a process that seems simple enough in a usability testing lab in Washington can be problematic for many families. So counselors—both parents and students—reduce just listing all the usernames and passwords for everyone to complete the dang FAFSA.
Once they do, eligible children can receive Pell grants that can make school more affordable. Parents swell with pride as their children enroll. And consultants with huge caseloads do the Lord’s work, 60 hours a week, year after year, for very little pay.
Given the challenges and potential life-changing gains, is sharing licensed usernames and passwords a serious problem? After all, families often exchange passwords for many reasons—solving a banking problem for an elderly parent or sick sibling, or hacking into a spouse’s frequent flyer account to book a trip for two.
But when you’re done with the FAFSA and ready to file, the Department of Education hits you with the following statement:
“If you sign this application or any document related to federal student aid programs electronically using a username and password and/or any other credential, you represent that you are the person identified by the username and password and/or any other credential and have not disclosed that username and password, and/or any other credential to anyone else.”
Then, in the next sentence, there’s more, and it’s terrifying: “If you knowingly provide false or misleading information, including applying as an independent student without meeting the unusual conditions required to qualify for such status, you may be subject to criminal penalties under 20 USC 1097, which may include a fine of up to $20,000, imprisonment, or both.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Education confirmed that the “misleading information” quote does include the use of a parent’s credentials when filling out the form.
There is no indication that the Justice Department has ever gone after a teenager who simply wanted to borrow money from the government or receive a four-figure grant. And it’s hard to imagine doing so in a presidential election year.
However, once it became clear that the students were doing something wrong, I decided to keep their names and the advisor’s names out of this column. Ultimately the kids were just following their counselor’s instructions. And this counselor is the very model of adult that Mr. Rogers probably had in mind when he used to tell people to look for helpers.
When I ran all of this to advocates for teenagers seeking better access to college, the reactions were amazing. Yes, they said, many people exchange usernames and passwords to complete the FAFSA. Thousands. Possibly millions.
But shedding light on this practice, they said, puts the new system at risk. A freaking, conscious IRS security can shut down the entire data transfer system. (The agency referred me to the Department of Education for comment.)
As you can imagine, the consultant here had no intention of kicking the IRS bear or causing trouble with the Department of Education. But even when he hasn’t suggested password sharing, some students are considering the idea on their own.
“I just had a kid tell me earlier today that he would do anything for his parents because they don’t understand the internet,” he said.
So the counselor remains baffled. The changes to the form and formula are supposed to allow more people to qualify for federal Pell grants that help low-income families. And they do — but only if families overcome the kinds of hurdles that may seem low to many but prove unwieldy for some.
“For me, I hope a story like this can make them rethink their policies,” the councilor said. “Who do they influence the most? The kinds of students I work with.”
