A New Way of Looking at Administrative Burdens and Race

A new paper from Dr. Denisa Gándara, an assistant professor at the University of Texas—Austin, begins on a dispiriting note: although there have been many policy efforts to increase educational opportunity since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Higher Education Act in 1965, they have largely failed to reduce ethnic and racial disparities at colleges and universities. As of 2021, 42% of white people 25 and older had finished a bachelor’s degree, but only 28% of Black people and 21% of Hispanics had.

One of the reasons that many of these efforts haven’t made as much difference as they could have is the administrative burdens that they place on students—the difficulty of the steps that students and their families must go through to apply for financial aid, or even to college at all.

“By requiring students to fill out a large form, rather than using government resources to identify the student’s eligibility, it creates a scenario where students might not access a service because they have competing responsibilities that prevent them from taking the time,” said Dr. Oded Gurantz, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. “[There are] students who are capable of going to college and being successful, but because of all these steps, don’t end up going.”

The most prominent example is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), a 108-question monster that the government has promised to simplify, although efforts have been delayed. But other burdens abound, including FAFSA Verification, in which students have to prove the truth of the information that they submitted on their financial aid form (and which research has shown has little impact), and applications for other sorts of aid.

These burdens have been shown to have disparate racial impacts, with deeper effects on minoritized applicants, who may be less likely to have the family or institutional support necessary to navigate the application processes. They also may be more likely to make money in less formal industries like childcare or house-cleaning, and so may face the extra complications with documenting their incomes. And along the way, they may encounter biased administrators whose treatment can create psychological barriers and the feeling that college is not meant for them.

In light of all of this, Gándara’s paper, written with Dr. Rosa Maria Acevedo, Dr. Diana Cervantes, and Marco Antonio Quiroz, all of the University of Texas at Austin, seeks to create a framework that researchers looking to tackle these issues can use—a comprehensive outline of how to examine the problem.

Dr. Denisa Gándara, assistant professor at the University of Texas—Austin“We’re making a case for why scholars, policymakers, and practitioners should think about administrative burdens and, in particular, how these burdens can be experienced differently and have different effects on racially minoritized students,” said Gándara.