Needless complexity in the federal financial-aid system costs students and colleges approximately $4-billion per year, according to a new working paper by two Harvard University scholars who are prominent advocates of a simplified aid-application process.

The authors — Susan M. Dynarski, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Judith E. Scott-Clayton, a doctoral fellow there — estimate that families spend 10 hours, on average, filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa. Because the average hourly wage is now $17.50 and roughly 10 million Fafsa applications are filed annually, the scholars calculate that the Fafsa generates a “time cost” of $1.75-billion.

Colleges and the federal government, meanwhile, spend $2.3-billion each year to pay the salaries of administrators who process and audit the applications, the paper estimates.

Those costs might be tolerable if the system’s complexity were truly necessary, the authors suggest. But they argue that only a few of the 70-plus data components in the federal aid formula generate almost all the variation in students’ aid awards.

In a series of papers during the last few years — and in an essay in The Chronicle — Ms. Dynarski and Ms. Scott-Clayton have urged a radical streamlining of the aid process. Families should be able to apply for financial aid simply by checking a box on their income-tax forms, they suggest. The IRS would then forward certain information to the Education Department.

Skeptics have raised questions about whether their method would be well suited for older and nontraditional students, but the idea has found an audience. (Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, has made it part of her platform.)

The new paper, “Complexity and Targeting in Federal Student Aid: A Quantitative Analysis,” is available for $5 from the National Bureau of Economic Research. —David Glenn