*1.2. The FAFSA Completion Project*

The cost of college is a significant barrier to postsecondary access for many students and families—particularly those from families with lower incomes and limited intergenerational wealth. According to the most recent trends in college pricing reports, undergraduate tuition ranges from \$3800 at community colleges and \$10,470 for in-state public four-year colleges to more than \$38,000 for a private non-profit college [29]. These prices do not account for the cost of living, which is approximately \$13,000 per year for room and board. To put these numbers into perspective, the median household income in the U.S. in 2021 was \$70,784 [30], and a low-income family would earn less than 200% of the federal threshold, the equivalent of \$52,492 for a family of four in 2020. Sending a child away to the public, in-state, four-year college would cost nearly \$25,000 per year, nearly half of what a low-income family would earn in a year. Fortunately, the federal—and many of the state—financial aid programs are means-tested, and so, lower-income families receive more significant financial assistance. The challenge is applying for the financial aid they need.

The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance [31] identified the need to simplify the financial aid application process. It made ten recommendations to Congress, including creating a more straightforward form, eliminating unnecessary questions, reducing reliance on paper applications in favor of a completely online system, and allowing students to apply for aid sooner to have better information in the college decision process. Many of those early recommendations were adopted, but the FAFSA continued to be a complex application for students and families. Dynarski and colleagues [10,18,19] continued to call for a more straightforward application, arguing that complexity in the financial aid system was a barrier to postsecondary participation and that the form could be reduced to as few as four or five questions that would provide reliable estimates of family need. Over the past decade, the Department of Education simplified the form and dealt with using tax information in two ways. First, they now allow "prior-prior" year taxes to be used in calculating a student's expected family contribution (EFC) so that the application can open sooner for students. Second, they built the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax retrieval tool to allow families to import their tax information into the form automatically. Creating a more straightforward form is an effective policy response but not a panacea. For example, the U.S. Department of Education added more questions to determine eligibility for independent student status, recognizing there are a variety of reasons why a student may not be supported by their parents to pay for college, including homelessness, participation in foster care, the death of their parents, or having and supporting their children. In those situations, increasing the number of questions helped to make the process more equitable. To this point, scholars discussed the importance of simplifying the financial aid application process, and they were effective advocating for change, but they did not conduct empirical research to examine the effects of those efforts to simplify the application.

Another line of inquiry focuses on providing direct support to students and families to complete the financial aid application process. This body of research recognizes that it may not be feasible to make the process simple enough, so they focus on strategies to help students and families complete the complicated processes. The College Goal Sunday initiative was created to assist families with the financial aid application process. The campaign name is a play on "Superbowl Sunday," which is the most popular sporting event in the U.S. that occurs each year in late January or early February—when most families would complete their financial aid forms (until the recent shifts to prior-prior year taxes and the October 1 opening of the form). In a typical event, financial aid counselors from local colleges would partner with school districts in their service area and identify a day (Saturday or Sunday most commonly) when families could sit and fill out their FAFSA and any relevant state forms with a financial aid expert. An evaluation of the program found that, in a typical year, these events served nearly 40,000 students but did not reach the target audience—low-income families who were least likely to apply for financial aid or attend college [20]. The program was effective for some, but it was not able to reach those with the greatest need. It was largely a descriptive study that suggested mixed effects overall but little success reaching the population of students who need financial aid most in order to attend college in the U.S.A.

Bettinger and colleagues [13] took a slightly different approach to FAFSA simplification, and their work was a precursor to the IRS tax retrieval tool. In 2008, they partnered with H&R Block tax accountants to conduct an experiment testing three conditions for FAFSA completion. Eligible families were sorted into three randomly assigned groups: (1) the control group that had their taxes completed, (2) the information-only group where families completed their taxes with an expert and were given information about how to file the FAFSA, and (3) the FAFSA completion group where the tax data were automatically transferred into the FAFSA online. The findings were striking. First, the information-only group was no different from the control group, meaning they were no more likely to apply for financial aid or attend college than those who received no information. This was a significant finding on its own because the most common FAFSA intervention in schools is a financial aid night where a local expert conducts a session for students and parents to educate them in the financial aid system and the application process—essentially, the information only treatment and the study found that it was not an effective strategy. The more important finding was that students in the whole treatment group were much more likely to apply for financial aid and to attend college. In some ways, this was a more robust version of the College Goal Sunday initiative because it had both the expertise of tax

accountants and the automatic import of tax information into the FAFSA. Both initiatives focused on simplifying the process by helping families navigate the complexity rather than attempting to simplify the form. The limitation of the H&R Block approach was that it is a fee-for-service model, and many low-income families cannot afford it or do not file taxes at all. They also mainly served independent students who did not need to use their parents' taxes to file their FAFSAs. Our intervention builds upon both the College Goal Sunday and the H&R Block interventions. We provide a comparable support to that of the College Goal Sunday, but we partnered with school counselors during the school day to reach students who would not otherwise seek out the support.

In Buffalo, we also built from the strengths of the Bettinger model but adapted it to target high school graduates financially dependent on parents or guardians while providing free tax support. Before developing the program, I spent six months shadowing school counselors at one of the lower-performing high schools in Buffalo. During that time, I was interested in understanding what barriers prevented low-income students and students of color in BPS from choosing to attend college. I found that counselors were asked for a considerable amount of help from their students on the administration of the college choice process—the college search, college applications, campus visits, SAT or ACT registrations, fee waivers for eligible students, and the federal and state financial aid forms. After that period of exploration, I proposed several strategies to free counselors from the administrative burden of the college choice process so they could spend more time counseling students on their future career paths.

In January 2010, we launched a simple pilot project at another comprehensive high school in Buffalo. We partnered with the United Way to make the voluntary income tax assistance (VITA) program accessible to students and families. At the same time, the university would provide trained volunteers to assist with the FAFSA and TAP applications. In just two months of service, our volunteers assisted 31 students with their financial aid applications—a modest number, but it was two-thirds of all the FAFSA applications submitted at that high school. We also found that the VITA program was not a successful addition to the project. Very few of the families came in to use the VITA service, and we did not have the technical capability to automatically import tax information into the FAFSA, as Bettinger was able to. Perhaps the most important finding from the school counselor's perspective was that it took approximately 90 min per student we served, which was effectively 45 h of their time that we could give back to them.

Less than a year later, Say Yes announced they would begin operating in Buffalo and offer a tuition guarantee to the next graduating class. District leadership asked their school counselors what could help more families complete the FAFSA and TAP applications. The counselors identified the pilot project as a possible solution. To bring the program to scale, we began by recognizing what was already being offered in the Buffalo schools. For several years, the district hosted a College Goal Sunday event which assisted approximately 110 students, on average, with the financial aid application process. The event accounted for over 20% of the FAFSAs submitted in Buffalo Schools in 2012.

In consultation with Say Yes and Buffalo Schools, we created a three-phase project to assist students and families with the financial aid application process. In the first phase, we went into each of the 14 participating schools, met with classes of students in a computer lab, and helped students complete the first half of the process, which, at that time, included generating their personal identification number (PIN) and completing the student information sections of the FAFSA, including their demographic information, high school attended, list of possible colleges, and responses to the independent status questions. The second phase was the College Goal Sunday event, which BPS called the Scholarship Fair. At this event, we integrated the tax prep services from VITA with financial aid support from local financial aid counselors. The final and longest phase of the project brought individual volunteers into each high school once or twice per week to work individually with students and their families on the remaining portions of the form. Say Yes announced a deadline of April 1 for financial aid forms to be submitted to be eligible for the tuition

guarantee, and so, the project was active from the middle of January through the end of March. From our experience shadowing school counselors in the year prior, we understood the importance of tailoring the project to each school; so, at the beginning of January, we met with each school counseling team to learn how best to implement the program in their schools, and we made slight modifications to the classroom/computer lab portion at the beginning and the final phase working with individual students. We understood that the program would only be effective if the counselors believed in it and were willing to connect their students to project volunteers.
