How some families break the rules when applying for financial aid

Here's the good news: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) website is now open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, following a years-long effort to simplify the process of seeking financial aid. This month I watched two high school students and their guidance counselor start the forms from scratch and turn them in in just over an hour.

And here's the strange news: the teens were able to complete the application quickly because they had logged in as well as themselves, each with their own username and password, and then again with their parents' login credentials (with their parents' permission) to reveal an important aspect complete the process.

The login transfer was the counselor's idea, and the parents—including one who is not a native English speaker and one who works two jobs, has little time, and is addicted to technology—were all for it, too.

But the teenagers made a false statement that broke the law.

No one goes to jail here. But the theoretical possibility underlines the unintended consequences of attempts to simplify things. In this case, safeguards are needed to protect private financial information. But any new login requirements could also be an impetus for many families with complicated lives to avoid them.

The scene I witnessed—parents' email accounts accessed on the counselor's laptop to access two-factor authentication codes, tax returns printed in a school conference room, children keeping track of their parents' various passwords—wasn't exactly surprising. After all, it's a prime example of the dysfunction in how we pay for higher education in the United States.

Countless people have worked for decades to create and adapt policies and systems to help low-income, first-generation students like the couple I met go to college. The efforts to simplify the FAFSA – the very ones that require parental logins – were part of an ongoing effort to make things easier.

So how did these good intentions result in what I observed in that school conference room this month?

The changes in the application are the product of federal law adopted in 2020. Making things simpler, it turns out, is so complex that it took three years to put into action.

Even with that multi-year timeline, the rollout of the new form — and the changes to the formula for how the federal government distributes its various types of financial aid — has not been smooth. Due to the Ministry of Education's “soft launch” on December 30, the website only remained open for short periods. The site was glitchy and parts of it confused people.

When I wrote a column on January 1 about my own inability to complete the form, I received a note from a school counselor. He wanted to read more about the experience for regular students. Good point. So I asked him to let me look over his students' shoulders as they made their first attempts to fill out the new form.

Families used to make a lot of mistakes on the FAFSA, especially when reporting their income. Often there was some kind of audit, which led to confusion, frustration and delays. The new application makes it easier for families to automatically transfer correct tax information from the Internal Revenue Service.

However, for everything to work, at least one parent of a dependent student will need a separate account with their own username and password. No problem, right? The students log in, do their thing, and then the parents get pinged, log in and do their thing.

But for advisors who work with low-income families where no one has ever attended college, the adult login process can be daunting. Many parents are unable to attend school meetings because they work, often working two or more jobs, or because they do not have good 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 looks quite simple in a usability testing lab in Washington can be problematic for many families. So advisors – and parents and students – cut corners by simply lining up all the usernames and passwords for everyone to get the damn FAFSA done.

Once they do, eligible children can receive Pell Grants that can make college more affordable. Parents swell with pride when their children graduate. And counselors with enormous workloads do the Lord's work, 60 hours a week, year after year, for too little pay.

Is sharing usernames and passwords with consent a serious problem, given the challenges and potential life-changing benefits? After all, families regularly exchange passwords for all kinds of reasons: to solve a banking problem for an elderly parent or ailing sibling, or to use a spouse's frequent flyer account to book a trip for two .

But once you have finished the FAFSA and are ready to file, you will receive the following statement from the Department of Education:

“If you electronically sign this application or any document relating to Federal Student Aid programs using a username and password and/or other identification, you represent that you are the person identified by the username and password and/or any other identification . and have not disclosed that username and password and/or any other login details to any other person.”

Then there's more in the next sentence, and it's scary: “If you knowingly provide false or misleading information, including your application as an independent student, without meeting the unusual circumstances required to qualify for such status you may be punished criminally. under 20 USC 1097, which includes a fine of up to $20,000, imprisonment, or both.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Education confirmed that the passage about 'misleading information' does indeed include the use of a parent's login details when completing the form.

There is no evidence that the Justice Department ever went after a teenager who just wanted to borrow money from the government or get a four-figure grant. And it's hard to imagine that this would be the case in a presidential election year.

But when it became clear that the students were doing something wrong, I decided to keep their names, and those of the supervisor, out of this column. After all, the children simply followed their supervisor's instructions. And that counselor is exactly the model of the type of adult that Mister Rogers probably had in mind when he told people they look for the helpers.

When I presented all this to advocates for teens seeking better access to college, the responses were surprising. Yes, they said, many people exchange usernames and passwords to complete the FAFSA. Thousands. Possibly millions.

But shining a light on this practice, they said, endangers the new system. A panicked, security-conscious IRS could shut down the entire dataport system. (The agency referred me to the Department of Education for comment.)

As you might imagine, the advisor's intent here was not to poke the IRS or cause any problems with the Department of Education. But even if he didn't propose password sharing, some students are coming up with the idea on their own.

“I just had a kid tell me earlier today that he was going to do it all for his parents because they don't understand the internet,” he said.

So the advisor remains surprised. The changes to the form and formula should make more people eligible for federal Pell Grants that help low-income families. And it is – but only if families overcome the hurdles that may seem low to many but prove difficult for some.

“For me, I hope a story like this can make them reconsider their policies,” the adviser said. “Who has the most influence on it? The kind of students I work with.”