EUGENE, Ore. – Over the long history of campaign promises, this one might actually be new.

“I would get rid of the FAFSA,” Hillary Clinton declared at South Eugene High School last weekend. “That is the cruelest joke in the world.”

FAFSA, which may not be a household word but was immediately recognizable by the Eugene high school/college audience, is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. It goes on for eight pages, including several sections that might be most successfully filled out by your accountant – although if you have an accountant, you’re probably not the typical applicant for financial aid.

High schools run seminars and workshops on how to fill it out, time that could go to SAT prep or algebra homework. Still, unlike the Form 1040 that it closely resembles, the FAFSA lacks the motivation that not quite finishing it can send you to jail.

It’s a classic example of how systems set up to provide access turn into barriers themselves.

“Get rid of it,” Clinton told the crowd again. “Get a box you can check on your tax form.”

This is an idea that makes so much sense that you wonder what it’s doing in a presidential campaign. It makes you think, for just a moment, that politics could actually be about solving problems, or at least making them a little more manageable.

“I think we can streamline and simplify the college aid and loan process,” Clinton said afterward in an interview. “The FAFSA form is a perfect symbol. My staff calculated people spend 100 million hours a year trying to fill the forms out.”

The word that comes to mind here is not “productive.” And for a lot of families, the word that comes to mind isn’t “successful,” either.

“It truly is a daunting task for families to take on,” says Roberta Cooper, who is in charge of college counseling at Portland’s Madison High School.

“It is a big task, especially for kids in lower socioeconomic circumstances, especially when the parents are working two or three jobs and aren’t around much. Then it becomes the student’s task, and getting family financial information is a horrible task.”

And another roadblock in front of kids the system is supposed to be trying to help.

Clinton isn’t the only presidential candidate who talks about college access, a situation that has been strikingly stagnant over a decade when the need for it has become steadily more inescapable. But she talks about college, and the way a system providing opportunity ought to work – a lot.

In an interview before she got to Oregon, she talked about the issue as one of her real educational experiences on the campaign trail.

“When I first started out, back in February, March of last year, I was not as aware as I might have been about the depth of feeling concerning college affordability,” said Clinton. “It brings people to their feet. They stand up and cheer when I talk about making college affordable, because it is a huge burden on most middle class and working class families.”

At campaign events in places like Eugene, Clinton often asks the crowd what kind of college loan interest rates they’re paying. She asks who’s paying 25 percent, and hands go up. She asks who’s paying a rate higher than that, and hands go up again.

“The outrageous interest rates charged by the student loan companies are totally beyond the pale,” she says over the phone. “When we have historically low interest rates, it’s a ripoff.”

In Eugene, Clinton’s last question came from a woman high up in the stands. She asked about reversing a Reagan-era change in federal rules that altered the age when a student applying for financial aid could declare herself financially independent of her parents.

It’s a technical issue – unless you’re the student.

Clinton said that it sounded like a reasonable idea, that the whole point of federal college policies should be to give a better chance to “kids who are doing the best they can.”

That could be done a lot better than it is.

“So much of what we’re doing is steering college attendance toward the wealthy,” she told the student up in the bleachers. “You go from campus to campus, and you find that most students are from families making over $100,000.”

Which is not an encouraging direction.

But if we think that the system is important, that we’re not doing enough to provide college opportunities and get barriers out of the way, that in the 21st century it’s going to be a problem that European and some Asian countries are raising their college education levels right past us, it’s not a bad thing to talk about during a presidential campaign.

It’s even worth talking about the FAFSA form.

After all, it’s a lot easier to talk about than fill out.

David Sarasohn is an associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. E-mail davidsarasohn(at)news.oregonian.com.