Hurray, US Dept of Education!

Not too often that you see that as a blog title, right?


Last week they did something really cool- yet very simple- for people using the web to try and navigate some of the higher education websites that they have. The web address for the Department of Education has always been http://www.ed.gov/- which makes sense to many of us who work in higher education, but not always to the every day person who is trying to figure out their (or their child's) Federal Financial Aid. The other government departments aren't abbreviated like that, for example there is http://www.justice.gov/ or http://www.treasury.gov/... but http://www.education.gov/ took you to an error page.


Not anymore! They have updated it to take you to the REAL US Department of Education page.

Why is this such a big deal? As also shown in this article, there are many websites that will take advantage of students who don't know as much about the FAFSA (free application for Federal Student Aid... free being the key word) and will charge them to file it through their site. Yep- that's right you can pay a fee to file your FREE application for Federal Student Aid through other sites. These sites were coming up instead of the education site

One service advertises that for the "low fee" of around $80 they will help you fill out your FAFSA, review and submit it. Maybe I'm biased working in higher ed, but I've been doing my own for years (including when I was a dependant student) and I thought the thing was pretty easy to do myself. Even students who I worked with who had never done it before found out it was easy after they got over the initial jitters of filling the form out. The FAFSA literally puts what line on your tax form you'll find the information on so you can go right down the line and fill everything in!

Some people do have really complicated taxes (or rather, parents do) and at that point if you can't figure out where to go/what to do that is what your college financial aid department is there for. They know that thing inside and out and can help you out- for free!!

So back to my original point. These outside companies were often coming up fairly high on the search pages when www.education.gov would send people to an error page, and the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, finally got on the tech folks around the Dept of Ed and had them update the links.

Because really, searching for a college is hard enough that getting error messages from the sites you depend on for information is not something you need!