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Dec. 15, 2022
Wesley Whistle wrote an article for Inside Higher Ed about transparency in financial aid letters from colleges and universities in the U.S.
A group of higher education associations announced the formation of a task force late last month on transparency in student financial aid offers, called the “Paying for College Transparency Initiative,” with a stated aim of “improving the clarity, accuracy, and consistency of student financial aid offers by producing a set of guiding principles and minimal standards to be used when developing aid offers.” Improving transparency is a noble and important effort, no doubt, but the announcement should raise several questions about why now, whom the task force serves and how it will help. And we should call into question a task force that has been announced the week before a Government Accountability Office report called on Congress to act on this issue.
Unclear and misleading financial aid offers are a well-documented problem. Students, college access counselors, journalists and policy analysts have said for years that financial aid offers—sometimes called “awards” or “letters”—presented by colleges and universities are often confusing and even misleading, making it difficult for students to discern between the grants, scholarships and loans offered to them, or even their full cost to attend.
A decade ago, the Obama administration even tried to model what financial aid offers should look like, noting that their “obscurities make the task of comparison-shopping for the most affordable and appropriate college even more difficult.” But with pickup of the Obama administration’s model financial aid award letter being purely voluntary in nature, the higher education team at New America decided to find out if the problem of misleading financial aid offers was real—and, if it was, just how big of a problem it was.
Read the full article here.