CAN NE,ED ANALYSIS PROCEDURES BE SIMPLIFIED THROUGH STEPWISE REGRESSION ANALYSIS?

Determination of the amount parents are expected to contribute toward the cost of postsecondary education involves several financial and nonfinancial variables of the family considered by experts in the field to influence ability to pay. It involves an assessment of the family's taxable and nontaxable in-come, federal taxes (FICA and income tax), state and other taxes, unusual medical and dental expenses, emergency expenses (casualty and theft losses) family size, family assets and debts, and the number of family members in college. These variables are used to determine the parents ' effective or avail-able income, from which parents ' contribution is calculated. Over the years, the techniques for measuring parental ability to pay have become progressively refined, as an outgrowth of efforts by the financial aid community to enhance both horizontal and vertical equity. Historically, these improvements have led to more sophisticated computational algorithms, but the number of items used to calculate parents ' contribution has not in-creased significantly since the last 1950s. On the contrary, as a result of the deliberations of the National Task Force on Financial Aid Problems, chaired by Frances Keppels and its development of a common application form, the numbefofttems entering into the computation has been somewhat reduced. Despite widespread acceptance of current need analysis procedures, recun';&apos