Continuing the Conversation: Assessing Ability to Pay Under a Simplified System

As part of our continuing National Conversation Initiative, NASFAA has released the third in a series of issue papers about selected policy areas. The paper, Assessing Ability to Pay Under a Simplified System, is now available in the NCI Resource Center.

The NCI proposal would compute an Income-to-Poverty ratio for each student (instead of an Expected Family Contribution) which is then used to determine maximum Pell award and as a relative measure of ability to pay as compared to other students. This paper explains the concept in detail and explores questions such as:

• How can we continue to measure family contribution without the kind of data we are used to collecting?
• How will we make decisions about distribution of funds?
• If we no longer have an Estimated Family Contribution (EFC) to subtract from cost of attendance, what we will do instead?

Please contribute your thoughts on assessing ability to pay.