The College Solutions Blog

February 16, 2015

Financial aid awards are often confusing. I believe many colleges and universities intentionally make financial aid awards hard to decipher to trick families into thinking that their institutions are being generous even when they aren’t. Obfuscation is an effective way to keep parents off balance. Since this is the time of year when students are receiving their financial aid letters,...

March 29, 2013

In my last three posts, I’ve written about deciphering financial aid letters. As I’ve mentioned previously, I believe colleges and universities intentionally make these documents hard to understand. If you missed the posts where I griped about this reality, here they are: What’s Wrong With This Financial Aid Letter? Evaluating a Financial Aid Award The federal government has created a...

March 22, 2013

Many financial aid letters  — heck almost all of them —  are confusing. I’ve always wondered why award letters are so difficult to understand. Perhaps the staffers generating these letters in the bowels of universities have been conversing in financial-aid speak for so long that they have lost their ability to communicate in standard English. Of course, the cynical explanation...