With College Decisions Looming, Students Ask: What’s The Cost, Really?

Students across the country this spring are confronting one of the most momentous decisions of their lives without an answer to a fundamental question: How much will college cost? The federal government’s lifeline of aid to low- and middle-income students has been mired in bureaucratic delays that leave aspirational students without the information they desperately need. Amid a national debate over college admissions in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court ruling rejecting race-based affirmative action, the issue of affordability is a crucible. And the government isn’t helping.