College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007

COLLEGE OPPORTUNITY AND AFFORDABILITY ACT OF 2007 -- (House of Representatives - February 07, 2008)

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Mr. DOGGETT. Madam Chairman, I yield myself two minutes.

This is the time of year when millions of families all over the country are working with their high school seniors. The college applications are in, but now it is time to try to figure out how to pay for college and higher education.

The task of completing these complex forms for student financial assistance can be very daunting. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, as it is known, is 11 pages long. It includes more than 100 questions and it has three worksheets. The Secretary of Education has called it ``longer and more complicated than a Federal tax form.'' In trying to complete the current application, students would actually probably benefit from having gone to college to do the accounting necessary to be able to set foot in a college classroom.

As David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times reporter comments in his new book, ``Free Lunch,'' each year an estimated 1.5 million students decline to seek federal student financial assistance for which they are eligible because the form is too complicated.

A report produced by the Institute for College Access and Success supports the approach that is taken in this amendment, and it identifies about a third of the questions that it highlights in its report as being questions that could be deleted if we could simply get two bureaucracies to communicate with one another.

That is really all that this amendment is about, trying to make the forms less complicated by getting the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education to communicate with each other and eliminate the confusion, to share data that is already available. This amendment would authorize the Secretary of Education to provide for the use of tax data that the IRS has available when the student aid form is due in February.

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Under this proposal, students would not lose their ability to correct any information that the Department of Education gets that might not be accurate.

The access would be improved; the accuracy would be improved. And it works both ways: just as we want to be sure that no student eligible for aid is denied that aid, or as is currently happening, because of the complex form, we also want to be sure that no student ineligible gets that aid.

That's one of the reasons that the Bush Administration proposed something similar to what I am advancing, because they were concerned that about $350 million every year in assistance is provided and lost as a result of inaccurate information. So it will be a two-way street: get the information that is needed, minimize the confusion and the bureaucracy, and help more students obtain the opportunity to get a college education.

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