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In the summer of 2011, I started as a College Affordability Advisor at uAspire. I supported students across several Boston Public Schools as they navigated financial aid for the first time, completing the FAFSA and CSS Profile, reviewing financial aid offers, and figuring out how to pay for college. At that time, students signed the FAFSA with a PIN. We crossed our fingers hoping the IRS Data Retrieval Tool would work, and if a student didn’t list an email, their Student Aid Report arrived in the mail on bright, colorful sheets of paper.

The FAFSA was a barrier, and reviewing financial aid offers was even more confusing. Colleges didn’t include their costs, inconsistently labeled different types of financial aid, and rarely calculated what students would owe. For families trying to make one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives, clarity was hard to find.

In 2018, uAspire and New America released Decoding the Cost of College, a report that examined how more than 500 financial aid offers communicated college costs and financial aid. What we found was alarming. Individually, many offers were confusing and obscured the actual cost of college for students navigating the process for the first time. For example, of the colleges that offered an unsubsidized student loan, we found 136 unique terms for that loan, including 24 that did not include the word “loan”. Looking at the offers at scale revealed how consistent these issues were across higher education and affirmed what uAspire advisors had been seeing for years.

We took these findings, along with input from partners in the field, and advocated for more transparent communication in financial aid offers. Not every student has an informed college counselor, community based organization advisor, or other trusted adult with college expertise who can help them interpret the financial decision they’re making. While there has been interest in making a change at the federal level, there has been little progress. 

Almost 8 years later, we decided it was time to update the field and see what colleges had changed about how they communicate financial aid. In our latest research, Caution: Prices May Vary, we reviewed more than 200 financial aid offers and assessed them based on the best practices laid out by the Government Accountability Office in its report, Financial Aid Offers: Action Needed to Improve Information on College Costs and Student Aid. We found many improvements since Decoding the Cost of College. A higher portion colleges in our sample now include both direct costs like tuition and fees and indirect expenses like transportation and course materials, and most separate the different types of financial aid, making it more straightforward that grants and scholarships are distinct from loans and work-study, and providing explanations of those aid types.

While these improvements are significant, problems persist. Across the 200 aid offers in our sample, we found 11 different ways of calculating the cost of college, a lack of clear next steps, and inconsistent, confusing terminology. For the families uAspire serves, understanding how much college will cost is the most critical piece of information. They want to know their financial commitment, including what they will need to borrow and what they will need to pay. If individual colleges cannot accurately and consistently provide students and families with a calculation that answers the question “How much will college cost?” then we need to push for legislation that will.

Since I started advising, the FAFSA has changed. Students now create studentaid.gov accounts, provide consent, and transfer IRS information seamlessly, and they receive a FAFSA submission summary within days, no colorful paper required. After some bumps along the way, the FAFSA has become simpler for students and families to complete. But we cannot say the same for how financial aid is communicated once students apply. Understanding how much you need to pay for college should not be a puzzle; it should not require tools like uAspire’s College Cost Calculator, and it should not require extensive research to recognize that we need to do better. Higher education remains one of the keys to economic opportunity for our students, and we cannot allow unclear, inconsistent communication about financial aid to get in the way.