The financial obstacles to accessing higher education are well-known. There are often very real barriers for students to having an open choice in selecting an institution. However, there are often resources and options available to students to help improve accessibility and college affordability, but it is the families who most need them that are the most confused, and have the most trouble accessing them.
This is acutely troubling when these families represent a growing enrollment segment at most institutions. Our ability to connect these families with necessary information to not only inform their enrollment decisions, but their financial decision-making across their higher education, will dramatically affect enrollment, persistence, and student success at our institutions—especially of our most vulnerable populations—in the coming years.
This resource is part of the Clearly Communicate Price and Financial Aid Roadmap. Access the Roadmap for stepwise guidance with additional tools and research.
Why does college affordability matter?
The college financing system is rarely transparent and easily understood by prospective students and their families, least of all by those most in need of this information—low-income and first-generation college students. There is a lot of information out there—from a variety of sources—but it is often confusing to know where to look for it, and even more difficult to distill it down into what it actually means for a specific student or parent. This means that many students and families…