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Each year, thousands of students decide where they will attend college and work to select an institution that best fits their needs. Many rely on their financial aid offer to help inform their choices. These offers provide critical details about how they will pay for college, including scholarship award amounts, information about grant aid and work-study opportunities, and federal student loan eligibility. 

Even though financial aid offers are important in the college decision-making process, they are often confusing for students and families to navigate. For this reason, �鶹������ý has long championed standard and comparable financial aid offers. A standard financial aid offer creates greater transparency in the financial aid process and helps students and families understand what a specific college will cost them, making them more confident in their decisions. Think of it as a car window sticker for higher education.

For over a decade, there have been and at the state and federal level to improve financial aid offers. Despite the attention, most transparency initiatives remain , and evidence shows that little has changed in how colleges and universities communicate price and aid. To see real change on this issue, state and federal policymakers must pursue standard, comparable financial aid offers that require all institutions to play from the same rulebook when communicating cost details.

In 2018, �鶹������ý and uAspire evaluated thousands of financial aid offers sent to students from hundreds of institutions and discovered that 36 percent of offers did not contain any information about cost. Our analysis also showed that colleges and universities used 136 terms to describe the same federal student loan, and 24 did not include the label “loan.” Seventy percent of all offers did not even differentiate between loans, grants and scholarships, and work-study. 

In 2022, four years later, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and reported that 91 percent of colleges and universities still understated or omitted net price in their aid offers. For their study, GAO evaluated a nationally representative sample of financial aid offers and compared them to best practices developed in 2019 by a federal commission comprised of the Treasury, White House, Department of Education, and 21 other agencies.  They found that no college or university in their sample met all 10 requirements and nearly two-thirds only followed half or fewer. The GAO recommended Congress act on establishing a standardized financial aid offer. 

uAspire recently did another review of financial aid offers and found some positive changes in language describing aid but ultimately found that the colleges they looked at used Accurate cost information for students and families depends on both the calculations and language used, so simply revising the text in aid offers only gets the field so far. 

Over the years, several bills have been introduced, aiming to address these problems with financial aid offers. Lawmakers across the political spectrum support fixing financial aid offers,  so efforts to reform them have gained significant momentum, including in this Congress. Just last year, both and held hearings on price transparency, where witnesses discussed the challenges of opaque financial aid offers. This Congress alone three bills have been introduced to try and tackle the challenges with aid offers, including a longstanding bipartisan bill known as , which would require establishing a standard financial aid offer that institutions must follow. 

Despite consistent momentum at the federal level to improve financial aid offers, no bill has managed to get over the finish line, even with Some states have created their own legislation to improve financial aid offers. Minnesota, for example, just recently enacted , which requires colleges and universities that received state grant aid to use a standardized financial aid offer. is another state that has a longstanding requirement for clear and comparable offers. has also introduced similar legislation during the 2025-2026 session, though it failed in committee. 

Victories at the state level are important, but financial aid offers will continue to be a nationwide problem. A student in Minnesota will soon get a clear, standardized offer, while a student one state over in Wisconsin is still left guessing. That is exactly the kind of inconsistency a national standard is meant to fix.

Every new car on the lot carries the same federally-required window sticker, listing the price and features in the same format no matter the make, model, or dealership. A college education deserves the same. We have the research, we have overwhelming and bipartisan public support, and we know what the solution looks like: standard, comparable financial aid offers that make every institution play from the same rulebook.