For some students, paying for college just became a little bit easier. The Obama administration announced in late June its intention to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

A goal of the administration is to lighten the load of the 16 million students and their families who must collect all pertinent financial information in order to fill out the six-page financial assistance application known as the FAFSA. Depending on a student’s circumstances, the paperwork can contain up to 153 individual questions.

During his presidential campaign last year, Obama promised to get rid of the FAFSA completely, an application that some say discourages students of lower-income backgrounds from applying for college.

According to some studies, there are up to 1.5 million college students who are eligible for federal Pell Grants but have not applied for financial assistance. Similar data has shown that some college students resort to private loans when they could receive better federal loans.

While the proposed changes would be a significant change in the financial aid application process, this wouldn’t be the first time the FAFSA has been altered. According to Bill Witbrodt, director of financial services at Washington University, the FAFSA has undergone several gradual changes over the past few years.

“The current FAFSA we have had less questions than the one the year before, which had less questions than the one the year before that,” Witbrodt said. “There has been some progress made toward simplifying it. The process can be made a lot simpler, and I’m thinking that the proposals that President Obama made should come to fruition.”

In the past, the increased simplicity of the FAFSA has not caused a great change in the number of applications received by Student Financial Services.

“I think the thought behind all this is that simplifying the FAFSA will be removing one of the barriers to college access in general,” Witbrodt said.

Some students and parents filling out the FAFSA, however, have complained about the length of the application.

“My parents complained about the FAFSA all the time,” sophomore Vaishnavi Hariprasad said. “My dad dreads filling it out every year because it takes so long.”

Even though the initiative to simplify the FAFSA is moving quickly, propositions to get rid of certain questions on the FAFSA require approval from Congress.

The Department of Education (DOE) acknowledged the problems with the current application, noting that several questions on the FAFSA are “largely unverifiable and could penalize families for saving for college.”

In January, the DOE will no longer require students from low-income families to answer questions about their financial assets that are not used to determine their eligibility for aid. In addition, the DOE will experiment with a plan that would permit the use of an applicant’s IRS data to answer 18 questions about finances.

Many students look forward to a more compact FAFSA application.

“I think reforming the FAFSA is great,” Hariprasad said. “I don’t think the form was inherently hard to fill out, but it was definitely tedious. I think getting rid of some of those other questions is really helpful, since when I was applying to college I didn’t know how to answer some of the questions.”

While many believe that the increased simplicity of the FAFSA will cause more people to apply for aid, Witbrodt said it is still more important to increase college accessibility by advertising the FAFSA.

“It’s not just simply the fact that the FAFSA is simpler to file,” he said. “It’s what kind of public relations are used to get the word out to students that the FAFSA is an easy form to complete and that financial aid is available.”