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Dec. 6, 2022
Rachel Fishman was quoted in an article by Inside Higher Ed highlighting one of her recent posts about colleges' financial aid letters transparency.
A blog post published Monday afternoon shined a light on why the issue matters. The post, by Rachel Fishman, acting director of higher education at the think tank New America, described her experience picking a college nearly 20 years ago.
“I narrowed my choices down to a couple of schools—one small liberal arts college sent me a frilly notification on beautiful paper, in an important looking folder that told me that I had qualified for over $20,000 in merit aid and several thousand dollars in federal student loans. The other, from a state school, was no frills and notified me that I only received federal loans as an out-of-state student,” she wrote. “This seemed like a no-brainer—I had gotten a car’s worth scholarship to a school located in one of my favorite cities. But the price information wasn’t there. My dad and I used Excel to input the data from the two offers, including tuition pricing and cost of living information. As it turned out, even with a substantial scholarship, the price of the private liberal arts college was so high, the state school, even as an out-of-state student, would be $20,000 cheaper. The decision at that point became obvious.”
New America published a report, “Decoding the Cost of College: The Case for Transparent Financial Aid Award Letters,” in 2018. Added Fishman, “Nothing has fundamentally changed with financial aid offers. Institutions still neglect to list price on their offers, and when they do a vast majority understate price.”
Read the full article here