Opinion: The FAFSA is the easy part. Really.

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I don’t wish for wealth all that often. Just when I’m filling out college financial-aid forms. And according to a story over the weekend in the New York Times, I’m not alone. Right now, with the deadline looming for the second round of financial information (or third, depending on the colleges and circumstances), it’s getting crowded in the clueless-parent department.

The paper’s story centered on the FAFSA, as doomed parents everywhere call it, which stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The form is so complicated (and repetitious) that President Obama has promised to eliminate it, parents pay $80 or so to have a company fill it out for them, and people with more money than most of us pay $1.500 to have really smart people fill it out really well, money they should then be forced to match in the form of a donation to the university of their choice.

Actually, the FAFSA didn’t strike me as all that terrifying, except for the part where some of the colleges wanted it filled out by Feb. 1 with my 2008 tax data, which is pretty much impossible because employers have until the day before to send out the W-2 forms. That’s OK. You’re allowed to guess the 2008 data, unnerving as that is. But then you have to update the FAFSA when you get the real information, as well as send your 2008 tax returns to the colleges by March 1 (at least for some universities). That’s when parental headaches become tax-preparer headaches.

Many colleges also require the College Board’s CSS Profile. Note the name ‘free’ is not in its title, and it is indeed not free because pretty much nothing involving the College Board ever is. I’m not sure what CSS stands for. College Sweat Shop? Perhaps, like the College Board’s SAT, it doesn’t stand for anything at all. The profile is far more complicated and repetitious than the FAFSA. It also cannot be updated online; parents have to print it out, hand-edit it, hard-copy the new version and mail copies to each college. Colleges don’t actually tell you to do this, by the way; they just want it.

Some colleges have additional forms that they alone require. One said on the phone that it needed a special-circumstances form, but when that was sent, they emailed asking why we hadn’t sent the verification form instead. Some want all the paper information sent by fax, others by snail mail, and some don’t want to muss their hands with paper at all, but want it sent to something called IDOC, another handy service of the College Board.

I’m confused. You’re probably confused. But what I keep wondering about are the people who don’t have $100 for a financial-aid service, don’t have a computer or, for that matter, a college degree themselves to figure all this out. No problem, we provide financial aid to the children of impoverished, uneducated parents. We just make sure there’s almost no way their parents can fill out the forms.

If Obama can fix this, curing the economy should prove a snap.

Business Wire photo of a worker at Student Financial Aid Services Inc., a company that helps parents with the FAFSA