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On Saturday, The New York Times wrote about the train wreck that is the free application for federal student aid, or FAFSA. The form, filled out annually by any college student applying for aid, was created in 1992 as a one-stop way for colleges to evaluate loan eligibility.

It has ballooned into a six-page, 100-question form that is an added ordeal for enrolling students. Congress passed a bill to streamline the questionnaire last year, but ended up adding seven new questions. Some families -- many of whom are the least likely to have the resources to do so -- are paying for help.

Arne Duncan, Obama's secretary of education, told the Times, "You basically have to have a PhD to figure that thing out." And with more students than ever applying for aid, demand for a simplified process is increasing. (Obama vowed during his campaign to revise the form.)

What's in a FAFSA?
A FAFSA can take days to fill out -- a recent college grad, I clocked two 4-hour sessions with it myself. The form asks all of the general information about you and your family: annual income and assets, tax information, family size, the number of kids attending college, etc.

Click here for more info and two girls' stories of filling the thing out.


The form is administered by an office of the U.S. Department of Education. They look at the cost of the school you are attending and determine how much aid you are eligible for and how much your school can help you. School aid comes in the form of work study, grants, loans and scholarships. Any aid that cannot be met by the school is called the gap.

As a fairly recent college grad, I can say that a much shorter form would have been helpful. I come from a low-income family and decided to attend NYU, one of the most expensive universities in the world. I have two parents with cancer and only one who works.

For all the time I spent filling out the paperwork, I was eligible for almost no school-based help and got almost all of my aid from Sallie Mae. I applied twice to have my situation reconsidered to no avail. I worked my ass off to get into that school, so I just tried to ignore that I'll be paying for it until 2059. (!!!!)

"A Lot of Unnecessary Arguments"
"I've had to fill out the form for the past four years and to put it bluntly, I'm pretty sure I guessed a lot of the figures since 99 percent of the time I wasn't sure what I was doing," says Jennifer, a 21-year-old NYU student. "I had to Google a lot of the terms in order to figure out what the questions meant. Most of them required me to go through my parents' tax forms, which I didn't understand, so I'd ask them and they'd have no idea what I was talking about since they aren't that fluent in English. Filling out that form resulted in a lot of unnecessary arguments."

Fixing the FAFSA is only the start of solving the problem-laden world of financial aid, but any progress is crucial to those students who rely on aid to succeed. Otherwise, a girl from the trailer park who lived in her car for years -- like me -- might have to give up on her dreams.

Tell us! What was your experience filling out the FAFSA? Did you need help? Was it worth the effort?

Loren Lankford is an NYU grad and product of the South, raised in Athens, Ga., on cornbread and sweet tea. She is currently writing, drinking too much coffee, antiquing and watching Buster Keaton movies while bouncing between Atlanta and NYC.