Higher education reformers have had their eye on the process through which students apply for federal financial aid for years. President Barack Obama has said he wants to reduce the number of questions on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who heads that chamber's education committee, wants to cut the application from its 100-plus questions to just two. The Gates Foundation announced this week the financial aid application would be a key policy focus for its advocacy work.

So what’s wrong with the FAFSA?

In general, proponents of change argue it is too long, asking for more information than necessary and creating barriers for access to federal funds for the students who need them most. Karen McCarthy, a senior policy analyst for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said reformers have a balancing act to perform. On one side, the application needs to be thorough enough so the federal government, states, and individual institutions can get enough information to make financial aid decisions.

“If you’re only asking a few questions, everybody looks the same and everybody looks needy,” McCarthy said. But the application also has to be simple enough to avoid disincentivizing students from applying for aid, she added.

Right now, the application is split into 10 sections. There are questions about a student’s personal information, background, income and assets, and dependency status. Then there are questions about parents’ personal information, tax filing status, and income and assets. Even though the form is an application for federal financial aid, colleges get copies of their students’ data to make local decisions about funding.

Sen. Alexander wants the FAFSA to feature just two questions asking about family income and family size. That, McCarthy said, would streamline the federal process but probably would not reduce the amount of time students spend filling out aid paperwork. Universities and their state governments need more information than that to decide how to allocate their own funding.

“If we’re trying to focus the right dollars to the right students,” McCarthy said, “we don’t want to pare it down so much that we can’t determine who the truly neediest students are.”

Already there are a couple hundred schools that ask students to fill out a separate financial aid profile produced by The College Board to qualify for institutional funding. If the FAFSA got a significant redesign, more colleges might turn to the same strategy or create their own forms.

While the FAFSA has a reputation for being time-consuming, Campus Logic compiled 10 facts about the application, including one about completion time. As it turns out, the average length of time students spend filling out the FAFSA has gone down every year since the 2010-11 academic year. For the current school year, the average student spent just 20 minutes on the aid form, which must be filled out annually to re-qualify for federal aid. The process is stressful, though, and it requires students and their families to gather a lot of data by strict deadlines.

Ben Miller, higher education research director at the nonpartisan think tank New America Foundation, has floated the idea of a one-time FAFSA.

The ideas for reform are varied and it likely will take time for Congress to come to any conclusions on a path forward. McCarthy expects a range of organizations to do their own research about improving FAFSA and then offer recommendations, allowing the conversation to coalesce around the best ideas. The higher education community ultimately must figure out where to draw the line.

“The FAFSA simplification process,” McCarthy said, “is very much an issue of finding the right balance.”