A New Effort to Make College Aid Offers Easy to Understand

Colleges and universities have been criticized for years for sending out financial aid offers to students that are confusing, opaque and sometimes misleading. Now, about 400 colleges and universities have agreed to take steps to bring “transparency, clarity and understanding” to their financial aid offers, a task force promoting the effort announced last month. The schools that have pledged to commit to the efforts of the task force, the College Cost Transparency Initiative, to send clear and understandable aid offers to students include two- and four-year public and private colleges in 43 states.