Extensive federal financial aid and scholarship forms have led to a stunning number of college applicants to second-guess their decision, a new study found.

Some 38 percent of students have considered skipping college because the financial aid process is complex and confusing, according to a survey of 1,000 students and parents published Wednesday by education solutions firm Sallie.

“The price of college is only part of what determines whether a family believes higher education is affordable,” a Sallie spokesperson told theThe Independent in an email. “Misconceptions about financial aid can also influence which schools students consider, how much they borrow, and whether they enroll at all.”

The confusion proved costly for nearly 1 in 4 families paying for college, who said they later found out they might have qualified for aid they didn’t apply for.

The oversight cost 33 percent of those families at least $10,000 in aid, the study found.

Sallie found that another 54 percent of families paying for college skipped at least one aid application because they assumed they didn’t qualify.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid - used by the U.S. government and schools to determine aid eligibility - has undergone a series of changes since its inception in 1992 to simplify it.

In 2012, the form debuted a data retrieval tool that imported an applicant’s tax data from the IRS directly into their federal student aid application, according to the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Legislation in 2020 and 2021 led to the application shrinking from 108 questions to 36, the association said.

However confusion remains, the Sallie study found, as families often have to fill out forms beyond the federal aid application to apply for school, state and national scholarships.

The country overall is struggling under the weight of its collective student loan debt.

Some 42.3 million Americans held $1.65 trillion in student loan debt in June 2026, second only to auto loans for the most non-housing debt in the country, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Education Data Initiative.

That debt has significant impacts on a borrower’s financial strength. Some 51 percent of borrowers who rent say their debt is why they haven’t bought a home, the Education Data Initiative notes.

Student loan debt has caused 28 percent of borrowers to delay a car purchase and another 21 percent to put off starting a business, the initiative noted. And 18 percent of borrowers say their debt payments make it harder for them to buy necessities for daily life.

To cut down on the future debt burden, the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” imposed loan limits for graduate students pursuing professional degrees such as medicine, dentistry, nursing and law, according to the Department of Education. Graduates cannot borrow more than $50,000 a year in federal student loans and $200,000 total for their degree program.