Washington Briefs

GOP Leaders Irate Over
Faulty Aid Forms

WASHINGTON — Students who depend on financial aid to attend college are receiving poor service from the U.S. Department of Education, angry congressional Republicans charged earlier this month.
At issue is a series of recent problems affecting application forms that students must fill out to qualify for aid. Last fall, department officials recalled about 3.5 million forms because of text errors.
The latest problem, GOP leaders say, involves confusion about a new requirement that students answer a question on the form asking whether they have ever had any drug convictions.
About 20 percent of all applicants, or 140,000 students, failed to answer the question this year — possibly because of confusion about its wording. As a result, colleges have had to delay aid disbursement to those students (see Black Issues, March 16).
The agency's financial aid system is suffering from "persistent, serious problems" in processing applications, complains Rep. William Goodling, R-Pa., chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, in a letter signed by three other GOP critics.
"Millions of students depend on federal funds to make attending college a reality," Goodling says. "The Education Department has a responsibility to ensure those forms are free of errors or misleading questions."
Instead, Goodling charged, department officials have been lax in field-testing its forms to catch potential problems before the agency distributes them to the public. The lawmakers criticized the "awkwardly worded" question on drug convictions, an issue that is a sore spot with some colleges and students.
In 1998, Congress passed a plan requiring the government to deny aid to students with drug convictions. But college officials have questioned how they will be able to monitor this practice. The question on the new Free Application for Federal Financial Aid was to begin to answer that question.
Goodling says he's particularly interested in department officials finding a solution to the drug conviction question that is easily conveyed to students but also avoids placing heavy burdens on schools.
Department officials say they won't prevent students from receiving aid if they  didn't answer the question on drug convictions. But students who left the answer blank will get notices that they must immediately report any past drug conviction, and they could face penalties for lying on financial-aid forms.