Our nation’s higher education system is in need of fundamental reform. It has lost the faith of the public, it requires constant fraudulent bailouts by the federal government, and it increasingly fails to prepare students for the jobs available in today’s economy.
The political consensus needed to reform our higher education is, lamentably, years away. Until that consensus is reached, however, Congress should do what it can to make sure the current system doesn’t become worse. Unfortunately, the latest changes to federal student aid programs, in addition to being negligently implemented, actively punish families with more than one child, an ill-advised policy at a time when the nation’s fertility rate is already falling.
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The Higher Education Act of 1965 authorizes a number of student aid programs, the largest of which currently includes $112 billion in direct loans and $26 billion in Pell Grants annually. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid Simplification Act, which was passed as part of a much larger spending bill in 2020, tweaked how students apply for aid from the Department of Education. Those changes are just now being implemented.
It was intended to simplify what everyone agreed was a burdensome and complicated application process, but President Joe Biden has completely botched the rollout, causing families across the country much stress and wasted time. Originally promised to be available Dec. 1, the rollout was first delayed till late December, and now that it is open, it is only available a few hours a day and has been subject to frequent breakdowns.
The Biden administration has been so intent on implementing its illegal college debt amnesty that it completely neglected to oversee this legally mandated overhaul properly.
Setting Biden’s incompetence aside, the specifics of the new financial formula mandated by Congress needlessly punish large families at a time when large families are exactly what this country needs to reverse our demographic decline.
Under the old FAFSA system, a student’s ability to pay for college was determined by an “Expected Family Contribution” formula, which took into account a family’s income, assets, and cost of living. That EFC number was then divided by the number of children the family had in college at the time. If the formula said a family of four could afford to spend $30,000, once both children were in college, the EFC number for each child would be $15,000.
Under the new FAFSA system, the EFC has been replaced with the “Student Aid Index.” Much like the EFC, the SAI takes into account income, assets, and cost of living, including the size of a family, but then it does not allow families to divide the final SAI by each child in college.
A family of four may end up with a slightly lower SAI for its children than a family of three, $30,000 instead of $34,000, but then the family of four is expected to pay that $30,000 for each child. The new system systematically punishes large families for each new child they put through college.
In an antiseptic world where everyone was individuals unconnected from families, the new system makes sense. Each student should be treated as an individual. But a key conservative insight into humanity is that we are not sterile creatures going through life on our own. We are embedded into families and communities, and those communities function much better when they are made up of large families.
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If anything, the federal government should be encouraging large families, not punishing them. Larger families mean larger, and younger, populations, which have proven to be essential for dynamism and economic growth.
Congress should act fast and correct the SAI formula so it does not punish the large families our nation needs to continue to grow.
