Here’s the good news: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, website is now open 24 hours a day, seven days a week after a yearslong effort to simplify the process of seeking financial assistance. This month, I watched two high school seniors and their college counselor start the forms from scratch and submit them in just over an hour.

And here’s the strange news: The teenagers were able to complete the application quickly because they had logged in both as themselves, each using their own username and password, and then again using their parents’ credentials (with their parents’ permission) in order to complete one important aspect of the process.

The login handover was the counselor’s idea, and the parents — including a nonnative English speaker and someone who works two jobs and is time-starved and technology-addled — were all for it, too.

But in doing so, the teenagers made a false statement that broke the law.

No one is going to jail here. But the theoretical possibility underscores the unintended consequences of attempts to make things simpler. In this case, safeguards are necessary to protect private financial information. But any new login requirements might also trigger an impulse for many families with complicated lives to bypass them.

The scene I witnessed — parents’ email accounts open on the counselor’s laptop for access to two-factor authentication codes, printouts of tax returns in a school conference room, kids keeping track of their parents’ various passwords — was not particularly surprising. After all, it is a prime example of the dysfunction involved in the way we pay for higher education in the United States.

Countless people have done their best over many decades to create and tweak policies and systems to help low-income, first-generation students like the pair I met get to and through college. The efforts to simplify the FAFSA — the very ones that prompt parental logins — were part of a continuing effort to make things easier.