There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from knowing you are meant to do something and still being unable to figure out how to do it. You open one website, which sends you to another. You search for the right form, realize you need a document you did not know existed and eventually find yourself waiting on hold with an office that is overwhelmed with people asking the same questions.

For college students, this experience is almost an everyday routine. We navigate financial aid applications, tax forms, housing systems, health insurance, student employment paperwork and countless administrative portals. Eventually, we learn to treat frustration as part of the process. But studying public policy has made me wonder why we accept that complexity so easily.

Public administration scholars have a name for these experiences: administrative burden. Upon my research I stumbled upon two scholars, Pamela Her and Donald Moynihan. Pamela Herd is a sociologist and a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy. Her research centers on topics like inequality, health, aging and policy. Her partner, Donald Moynihan, is also a public policy expert, and they often team up to explore the challenges of administrative burdens in government programs. 

In their research, Herd and Moynihan describe three types of costs people encounter when interacting with public programs: learning costs, or figuring out what a program requires; compliance costs, like completing paperwork and providing documentation; and psychological costs, including the stress and frustration produced by the process. Their research also finds that these burdens can prevent eligible people from accessing services to which they are entitled to such as social welfare programs; particularly........

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