Out of all the complicated forms a student can expect to fill out, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, surely ranks among the most arduous of paper journeys upon which a student will have to embark. With the recent arrival in our AccessPlus personal messages, we have been reminded that the deadline to file a FAFSA looms dead ahead.

Within the next few weeks, we will all have to sit down with our parents (if dependent) or our lonely selves (if independent) and spend perhaps hours poring over financial documents. Although you may very well have suppressed the memory of such an event, try to recall its crux: that magic number called an Estimated Family Contribution (EFC). The linchpin of the FAFSA experience, colleges use the EFC “to calculate the amount of federal student aid you are eligible to receive.”

Although it allegedly measures “your family’s financial strength,” the EFC seems like an arbitrary number. If you have the courage to use a worksheet provided by the federal government to see how your EFC is calculated, prepare to be baffled with what looks like more arbitrary numbers and a set of forms even less comprehensible than an insurance policy, a credit card policy, a mortgage, or basically any bill that has gone through Congress in living memory.

The website of President Barack Obama’s White House states that Obama has “set a new goal for the country: that by 2020, America would once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” That site offers four general ideas to improve access to higher education: Help middle class families afford college, keep costs down, strengthen community colleges, and improve transparency and accountability.

Simplifying the paperwork associated with getting financial aid would probably help. The current forms are daunting to say the least, which, as we have learned from Democrats criticizing the idea that an ID to vote, limits access on its own.

And if you do manage to pass the great barrier form, you may find that your parents make “too much” money and that your EFC is too high to make you eligible for grants. In that regard, the FAFSA — and, therefore, the federal government — presume a familial relationship in which parents substantially contribute to their children’s college education. With high debts of their own in a slow economy, however, that presumption threatens the creation of a cyclical problem.

Expecting the current college age cohort’s parents to pay for much of their costs of attendance at college, when those parents cannot, means that students are only eligible for more loans. In a few decades, then, today’s college students will be parents who are unable to pay for their children’s education because they still have loans of their own.

At the end of the day, students must overturn every possible rock for potential scholarships. If the federal government is going to do anything to make college more affordable and accessible, perhaps the FAFSA should be simplified, the EFC made less arbitrary, and a nationwide index of scholarships put together. Uncle Sam taxes everyone, provides health insurance to millions of Americans, and takes a census every 10 years. Making a list of all the college scholarships offered in the United States can’t be that hard.