Educational Leaders Reiterate Commitment To Simplify State Financial Aid

Sarah Tucker, chancellor of the Higher Education Policy Commission, told lawmakers in September that the state’s academic aid system is too complicated.

Monday afternoon Tucker told the House Higher Education Subcommittee one of the first steps to simplification is removing some of the existing, often contradictory, requirements across the state’s various academic financial aid programs.

“These may not seem like big things, but when one program says this, and one program says this, and one program says this and one program says this, added together, it’s really hard to navigate,” she said. 

Tucker said the changes being proposed, like doing away with drug testing for West Virginia Invest grant recipients, would remove barriers but would require some kind of change in code.

Tucker also reiterated her office’s intent to create a single source application for the state’s 17 disparate academic aid programs.

“We’re going to make the site that they go to more like a Turbo Tax site and less like a government site where you apply for financial aid,” she said. “I think that those things will be a good phase one for this financial aid redesign.”

The next step, according to Tucker, would be to address similar inefficiencies in graduate student programs, but much more work remains in the first phase of streamlining.