The New FAFSA Reinstates Primogeniture
You probably remember from high school that much of human history was profoundly shaped by primogeniture, the rule or custom of conferring economic benefits on the firstborn child. Typically, primogeniture meant that firstborn sons would inherit the family land, business, or noble title. Kids who were unfortunate enough to be born later were out of luck (and in most cases, women were out of luck entirely). Though it sounds crazy to modern ears, birth order was far more relevant than knowledge or skill when it came to getting ahead in the ancient world.
The Department of Education wants to bring primogeniture back.
As the new year dawned, the Department opened up the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, better known by the acronym FAFSA. The revised application is the result of a congressional mandate to make the form simpler, and early indicators suggest that the form is, at least, shorter (in part because it auto-fills information from tax returns). But the revised form isn’t the problem; the algorithm that determines financial aid is.
In simple terms, the FAFSA form is designed to figure out what each family can pay for college (previously called the Expected Family Contribution or EFC) and backfill what families can’t afford to pay with either grants or loans. The goal is to make sure that any kid can go to college even if their families can’t afford to pay the full price tag.
But it’s controversial how to calculate what families can afford to pay towards college. In particular, it matters a great deal how many kids are attending college at the same time. If a family has a discretionary income of $30,000, that makes it look like they can cut a check for $30,000 each year to Big State U. But if they have two kids in college at the same time, that discretionary income is really split between the two of them.
The previous iteration of the FAFSA took this into consideration when it calculated expected family contribution. It was called the sibling discount: if your older sister was in college, that affects how much your family is expected to contribute to your college education. In simple terms, the old system would reduce each student’s expected contribution by half if there were two kids from the same family in school, by a third if there were three siblings in college at the same time, etc.
Not anymore. In an effort to simplify the process, the new FAFSA algorithm eliminates the sibling discount and calculates a family’s expected contribution (now called a Student Aid Index or SAI) without regard to how many children attend college at the same time. If a family has $30,000 of discretionary income, that full amount is calculated as available for college expenses for both child number one and child number two.
The effect of this change is obviously devastating for any student unlucky enough to not be a firstborn. When the first child goes off to college, a family is able to rely on Federal financial aid to backfill everything they can’t pay out of pocket. But when it’s time to send the second off, that’s no longer the case. The family’s available cash is now double-counted by the Department of Education, leaving the second-born child with fewer options than her older sibling who is already enrolled.
There are many reasons why eliminating the sibling discount is a problem. First, it violates a basic ethical directive to treat like cases alike. It’s morally irrelevant whether you were born first, second, or third. That’s the problem with medieval primogeniture. Yet the new financial aid calculation puts firstborn children at a decisive financial advantage despite the moral irrelevance of their birth position. Kids born first will have more college options than kids born later. That’s a distinction without a moral difference.
Second, eliminating the sibling discount makes access to higher education even less equitable than it is now. Higher education is awash in talk about equity and in particular how equity differs from equality. (If you haven’t seen the cartoon meme illustrating the difference between equity and equality with spectators and boxes, you’re probably not on social media.) If equality is giving each person the same thing, equity is about giving each person what they need to succeed. But obviously what a student needs to succeed in college depends crucially on whether her family is already paying tuition for a sibling. So, it’s inconsistent for higher education to trumpet a commitment to equity and then allocate financial aid in an inequitable fashion.
Third, eliminating the sibling discount will hit a significant swath of families and have a more significant cost for Black, Hispanic, religious, and conservative families, all of which are more likely to have larger families than their White, secular, and liberal counterparts. About 30% of American families sending kids to college have at least two enrolled at the same time, and most of those are middle-class families. Even if this kind of racial and class targeting were unintentional, we should care about a policy’s disparate impact regardless of the intentions.
Most of us recognize that the ancient preoccupation with birth order was misplaced. Let’s insist on a FAFSA form that avoids the same mistake.
