Middle-income families still need substantial aid

Every February I battle my way through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

I don’t know why I continually put myself through this. It is lengthy, complicated and rather time-consuming, and ultimately it makes me want to set fire to any and all IRS-related paperwork.

Of course, I’m not the only one who has a few complaints about FAFSA. Its complex and daunting nature has often been blamed for intimidating lower-income families from even considering college.

The Rethinking Student Aid Study Group has recently recommended that the FAFSA be scrapped and financial information be taken directly from income-tax returns.

While I applaud this notion of simplification for everyone’s sake, I must object to some of the other recommendations. Another focal proposal of the study group is to shift funding from more middle-income families to lower-income ones.

The group advocates that aid now going to students with incomes higher than 250 percent of the poverty level should be directed to lower-income students (as well as a reduction in the amount of aid for families only mildly below this level).

While I do not disagree that lower-income students are in the most need of funds, there are many outlets of assistance for them – states, universities and private sources that include scholarships and grants all contribute to financially supporting those below, at, or barely above the poverty line.

There are far fewer of these resources for more middle-class families who are now seriously grappling with rising tuition and living expenses. Many Ivy League schools and other well-endowed universities have restructured their entire financial aid systems to better accommodate middle-income families.

Harvard, for instance, has adopted a “0 to 10 percent” policy that states any family earning $180,000 or less will not have to pay more than 10 percent of its income (families below $60,000 are not required to pay anything).

For the middle-income families who’s children will not be attending an Ivy, however, financial aid can play a crucial role in college attendance and debt acquisition. Two-hundred-fifty percent of the poverty line for a family of four is only $53,000, and under the study group’s recommendation, only families earning less than $31,800 would receive the maximum Pell Grant amount of $5,000. It’s not as though by “middle-income” we’re talking about the rich and famous here.

While helping the lower-income families should certainly be a priority, it is unfair and injudicious to unreservedly neglect families that earn slightly above an arbitrary line yet still struggle with the costs of higher education.