Cleve Brooks, dean of admissions and father of three children who have received TOPS, wishes the form he has to fill out to be eligible for the state scholarship was shorter and easier to complete.
The Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance advocates keeping the current application form for TOPS because the advantages for students are greater than the irritation of filling out the form, said Gus Wales, LOSFA’s director of public information and communication.
Every person who wants to receive TOPS, a merit-based scholarship, has to fill out the seven-page Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, said Pat Dietrich, director of LSU Student Aid.
“If TOPS is truly an academic instead of need-based scholarship, why do you have to apply every year for it?” he said. “You just repeat the same information over and over again.”
Georgia has the HOPE scholarship, a financial assistance program comparable to TOPS, and applicants only have to fill out a one-page application or register once online, according to the Georgia Student Finance Commission.
When filling out the FAFSA form, students become eligible for federal Pell Grants and subsidized and unsubsidized Stafford, Perkins and PLUS loans, because the form asks for financial information of the applicant and his or her family, Dietrich said.
Wales said filling out the FAFSA for TOPS automatically allows students to be considered for federal and state aid through one application. Some of these students normally would not realize they were eligible for financial assistance until they filled out the FAFSA, he said.
The year after the TOPS program started, which required students to fill out the FAFSA, the number of Pell Grants increased, Wales said.
The Board of Regents requested LOSFA sign a contract with Lipman-Hearne Inc., an independent research firm from Chicago, to determine whether the FAFSA is the best application form for TOPS, he said.
The LOSFA commission met Tuesday with Tom Abrahamson, chief executive officer of Lipman-Hearne, to review the findings.
Abrahamson reported in favor of keeping the FAFSA application for TOPS applicants because the advantages significantly outweighed the disadvantages for students.
Dietrich said requiring students interested in receiving only TOPS to fill out the FAFSA is inefficient because people who make too much money to qualify for federal financial aid have no incentive to fill out accurate information.
Inaccurate information harms statistics the Office of Student Aid tries to produce through the FAFSA, he said.
Besides inaccurate information, the Office of Student Aid received 37,349 FAFSA applications this year — 6,000 more than LSU’s total enrollment, Dietrich said.
Having to process every FAFSA form it receives drowns the office in paperwork, he said.
The FAFSA makes applicants list six colleges on the form, he said.
“Every high school student in the state is going to list LSU,” Deitrich said.
Out of all the freshmen who entered LSU in fall 2002, 4,222 received TOPS — 82 percent of the freshman class and 92 percent of entering freshmen Louisiana residents, he said.
This fall, 13,600 students received TOPS, and this spring, 12,400 students still have TOPS, he said.
The decline in numbers can be attributed to the students who graduated in December and some freshmen who did not make the 2.0 required GPA in the fall, Dietrich said.
The agency that administers TOPS — LOSFA — is also the largest loan guarantor for LSU, Dietrich said.
Since LOSFA has gained more opportunities to offer loans to students through the TOPS applicants, he said it would be true to say LOSFA has ulterior motives to keep the current method of applying for TOPS.
Out of 37,349 FAFSA applications received by LSU in 2002-2003, 14,915 people were offered federal aid, and 11,396 of those received loans, Dietrich said.
Out of the total number of students on TOPS in 2002-2003, 16 percent received Pell Grants, he said.
The University does not get benefits from students who receive financial aid, but it receives administrative allowances to administer federal programs such as Pell Grants, Dietrich said.
Getting rid of the FAFSA form when applying for TOPS would not affect the administration but would affect the students filling out the form, he said.