 Good morning, everybody. Welcome to New America. My name is Kevin Carey. I'm the director of the Education Policy Program here. We're very excited to be here today, along with our partners today, USPIR, to present new findings from a big new, what we think is a groundbreaking research project on the always exciting topic of financial aid award letters. Exciting to us, and here's why. I think everyone who works and thinks about higher education understands that the outcomes of higher education for a lot of students, particularly low income students, first generation students, students of color, are not what we want. We have many students who enroll in college and drop out. Many students who take out loans that they can't repay. And I think the more research that comes out about particularly the long-term effects of debt and the impact of debt on intergenerational wealth, and we've had some new research on that lately, too, really shows that for far too many students, the college choices they make are not the best choices. And I think a big reason for that is that in this country in particular, we really rely on the market to discipline and regulate our higher education system. The government really does very little to tell colleges how to be colleges, how to teach, how to support students. The accreditation system is, I think, a thin layer of oversight. Some states are better than others in terms of how they look after students. But of course, we have the whole nonprofit sector and we have the whole private sector. So we really rely on people making choices in a market almost with a kind of blind faith that that's all going to work out. The people will find the right college for them. But of course, Econ 101 tells us that when you're choosing anything in a market, you have to consider both what you're choosing and what it costs. And the what it costs part of it is expressed by financial aid award letters. These are the documents that students have to sit down and make choices with to make choices in the market that we rely on so much. And there's been a little research over the years and some questions raised about award letters. But nothing, I think, really comprehensive to make the case of just exactly what the current state of things are, how the market is functioning, what students and parents, particularly low income students and parents who have the most complicated choices to make because their awards are the most complicated, what they're faced with. And I think the results of the research that you'll hear about today are alarming. I really think that it is a call for change. A call for change here in Washington, a call for change out of the states, and a call for change at the institutions themselves who ultimately make choices about what kind of information they're going to present to students and what kind of information they're not. So we have a great set of research and a panel today to talk. I am going to now hand it over to my colleague, Rachel Fishman, who is a leader and co-author on this report. Rachel is New America's deputy director for higher education research and has led this project along with our colleagues that you aspire, Rachel Fishman. Good morning, everyone. As Kevin said, my name is Rachel Fishman. I'm deputy director for higher education research. I'll get this kicked off. And today, I'm pleased to share with you the findings from Decoding the Cost of College, the case for transparent aid award letters. But first, I wanted to thank my co-authors and researchers from both USPIRE and here at New America. Laura Cain, Julie Habert, and Brendan Williams from USPIRE, and Ben Barrett, Kim Danty, Sophie Nguyen, and Steve Byrd here at New America. I'd also like to thank the Kresge and Jack Kent Cook Foundations, who generously supported this important work. And I'd also like to thank Lumina Foundation, who put USPIRE and New America in touch, and this collaboration would not have been possible without them. So for those who want to continue this conversation online, I know there are tweeters out there on one of them. And I'll join you shortly, but I'm really bad at presenting and tweeting at the same time. You can follow the conversation at hashtag transparent award letters. All right, so why do transparent aid letters matter? So for years now, we've been focused on simplifying one of the biggest barriers we know to unlocking financial aid, the FAFSA. But less attention is paid to another important step in unlocking this aid, award letters. Even though there have been some efforts to standardize financial aid letters, such as the US Department of Education's shopping sheet, which it worked with in partnership with the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, and also NASFA's Code of Conduct, our analysis shows that it's really the wild west when it comes to financial aid award letters, with hundreds of different ways to communicate thousands of dollars to students. And this in aggregate is billions of dollars of federal student aid. So right now, no federal policy exists that requires standard terms, formatting, or critical information on every letter. And this can threaten the long-term health of families because it obscures their costs. Importantly, if a student doesn't understand their costs and aid, they may not have enough money to complete their education, and they might end up stopping or dropping out. And stopping or dropping out is one of the major determinants of student loan default, which means they're putting their own individual investment at risk, but also the nation's investment at risk, since a lot of those dollars are backed by taxpayer dollars. Just a little bit of background on the analysis we conducted. So we did a quantitative analysis of over 11,000 award letters for the 2016-17 academic year. These letters were sourced from US Buyer's direct service work, working with students and families. They represent 913 colleges and universities from nearly every single state. In total, these letters were from approximately 6,000 students, 74% received the Pell Grant. We took a closer look at 515 letters to better understand how these letters actually looked and how they were formatted. And so to get at this 515 number, we started with 913 unique colleges in our entire data set and removed those that did not include Pell to try and keep comparisons consistent among packages. And then we omitted the shopping sheet, and we also omitted online portal communications, because we really wanted to make sure that what we were looking at were the financial aid award letters themselves. So given our data set, we know that three quarters of the US Buyer students in our sample received Pell, and thus they trend low income. So when looking at the financial aid packages for these students and their total cost of attendance, so total cost of attendance being both their direct cost of tuition and fees and room and board if they're living on campus and indirect expenses, such as books and supplies, transportation, other things we know are important to being academically successful. We found that students face enormous gaps, as you can see, when it comes to paying for college. And these gaps persist regardless of loan aid. So again, across all letters, US Buyer students were faced with covering more than a third of their costs, as like all the way in the left column. And as you'll see, the lighter teal is a gift aid that they had to cover their costs, and the darker teal is loans. So they still had, and those are student loans, those are not Parent Plus loans. And so that gray gap is what those students still faced after all their aid was taken into account. This gap persisted regardless of many scenarios that we think are maybe cost saving measures, such as living off campus. You'll see the gap is even larger for off campus students. Going to a four year public school as an in state students still face a third of a gap. Going to a more selective school, so a school that accepted less than 50% of students is still a quarter gap to pay. And then we added in 80% graduation rate for Pell, which is probably indicating our big findings of 455 colleges that listed unsubsidized loans. There were 136 unique terms, and 24 did not even call them loans. This is when I'm like, ah! I mean, that's crazy to have something on a note. I had that emoji by the way this morning when I tweeted about that, so I'm imitating that. That is just a crazy amount of ways to term the same thing. There's plenty of insider lingo and acronyms such as the Supplemental Education Opportunity Grant, just calling it SEOGA on the letter, so it doesn't even show up as a grant. So students aren't aware what that is. Not to mention the myriad ways of defining net costs. So net cost as federally defined is full cost of attendance, direct and indirect. Direct costs and indirect expenses minus all gift aid, but schools were defining it as direct costs minus gift aid, and some schools were doing direct costs minus gift aid minus loans. So it led to a lot of confusion. And so here's one of those letters. This is a letter that did not use the word loan. Instead, it's calling them direct subsidized loa, direct unsubsidized l, direct parent plus loa, and so this is, and then of course, as you can see, it totals it all together. So that's just an emblematic example of one of the letters. So here is, so colleges and universities also fail to differentiate types of aid. So, oh, sorry. I'm sorry, I apologize. More than one third of colleges included no cost information. So imagine getting a financial aid award package but having no number to subtract that aid from to see how far that aid is actually going to go and what you actually need to pay to get through the doors of college. 17% of schools only provided direct costs which doesn't help students understand that they'll need to budget for those indirect expenses that I mentioned, such as books, transportation, and other expenses. So here is one of those letters from Adelphi. It only lists direct costs. So it totals that up and then erroneously, so you see it's tuition fees and room and board. Those are considered direct costs. It doesn't mention any indirect expenses. And then on the right, you'll see that it has a total estimated budget and that total estimated budget completely matches the total of direct costs. So they're trying to say that that's an estimated budget when we know that there are many components actually missing from that estimated budget. So colleges and universities also fail to differentiate different types of aid. There's 300, so there were 359 letters that presented all aid lumped together with no distinction. So everything was all lumped together like grants, loans, and work study without any explanation of what those different things were. 53 letters partially separated things and 103 separated each thing under their appropriate heading and of those 49 presented the, explain the differences between these aid options. So this is a very common example of what we saw. Everything's lumped together to yield a total number when some of this is free money. So you can see like grant, grant, waiver, grant, and then some of this money you need to pay back. So we have loan, loan, uh-oh, grant, another grant, and then some of it is money that needs to be earned. There's a work study and then at the very bottom another loan. And so all of this is totaled together to yield an entire package. Parent plus loans are different than federal student loans. They're borrowed by parents. Parents must pass a credit check. They have higher interest rates and they don't come with the same flexible repayment options as federal student loans. So these differences make it critically important to communicate this aid source clearly. But of the 128 institutions that included plus on their award letter, there were 67 unique terms and 12 failed to even call them loans. 15% included it as a line item and totaled it within the aid package, which we find particularly egregious, while 12% provided clear communication in that they mentioned it that it's another option and didn't use it in the total calculation. So that's the better practice. So this letter from Northern Arizona University includes over $19,000 in plus loans for a low income family. It does not call it a parent loan. And it also totals all aid, bringing unmet need to, if you can see at the bottom, I know this one's really small. It says all aid bringing unmet need to $0, even though this package comes with tens of thousands of dollars in intergenerational debt. Like plus loans, work study is a unique source of aid with specific conditions, namely, it must be earned in a work study eligible job. If it conditions, namely, it must be earned in a work study eligible job. It's not available to pay bills upfront and is distributed through a paycheck. So even though this aid element is fairly unique, 60% of institutions listed it just as if it was like any other award on the letter. So here's an example of this common practice as well. So as you can see, it's just totaled with no explanation as to what work study actually is. So when it finally came to doing the math for students, telling them how much they'll owe, only 40% presented students with the amount they were responsible for paying through other sources than grants and loans. For those 40%, there were 23 different calculations which make it almost impossible for families to compare award letters between schools. So here is one misleading calculation from the University of Arizona. Total cost of attendance, $48,000. It then subtracts gift aid and then it subtracts federal student loans. It calls them self-help options excluding credit-based loans that probably also could include a work study. It then subtracts credit-based aid offered, which I'm guessing is most likely a parent plus loan. And it yields a net cost of zero. The thing here is if you buy a car that costs $45,000 that comes with a $6,000 rebate and a loan for the rest, you wouldn't consider your net cost to be $0. The final steps to unlocking aid include information on accepting, declining, reducing amounts, how to access your student portal, and next steps with borrowing loans. Only half of institutions stated a clear policy in their award letters for accepting aid. Of those half-required students to accept the aid they wanted, a third accepted all aid, which we find problematic when it comes to auto-accepting loans, and then one-tenth accepted scholarships but not loans, which is probably the better practice. We never want students to be leaving free money on the table. So we have a few policy recommendations, and as our analysis shows, students and families are confronting a detrimental lack of information and transparency when making one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives. For this reason, we have several recommendations. One, require written financial aid offers. Congress should mandate that all accepted students who submit the FAFSA receive a financial aid offer, and the field should actually shift to call these offers and not award letters, which we consider to be a misnomer, so we should really stop calling them award letters. Two, employ standard terms and definitions. Congress and state governments should require precise titles and definitions. Surely we can do better by students than 136 terms for the same loan. Three, include a breakdown of costs listing direct and indirect expenses, so students are aware of exactly what they're going to need to budget for one year of college. Four, list gift aid and loan separately under their own headings and subtotal them. Five, exclude parent plus and work study as line items and aid offers, since they are not considered definitive dollars and only an option to cover any remaining costs after gift aid and loans are applied. Six, calculate net costs and estimated bill. Net cost is already defined as cost of attendance minus gift aid and is all in cost for one year, estimated bill is a new term that we're pushing towards that is what a student is expected to pay to set foot on campus, so this is really the bill that they're gonna get from the institution, and so this should be something that's direct costs minus aid, including loans, but not including parent plus loans or work study. This mimics how aid is actually applied to students bill and what is again required to actually set foot on campus. Seven, it is important and vital to lay out to lay out for students how they can unlock their aid, including accepting and declining awards, reducing those awards, and then important next steps, especially when it comes to student loans, putting a deposit down and accessing a student portal. Additionally to this, New America calls on Congress to require a standardized offer template, like the shopping sheet, but starting anew with stakeholders and making sure it's consumer tested. I think that we can make progress by ensuring that we have a template that might have some differences depending on institution types, such as a community college versus a four year institution, and for type of student, and what I really mean by that is undergraduate versus graduate student, because they have very different aid types. So you can again read about all of our recommendations in the report, and I am now going to toss it over to Laura Cain from US Fire, who's the chief policy officer, and she's gonna introduce our panel. Thank you, Rachel. I invite our panelists to come on up at this time. This is more like the coffee chat because it's early in the morning. Feel free if you need one more cup to hop back there. Or bring your shoe with you too. Shoes optional. It is the beach season. It's Cinderella moment here. Absolutely. Great. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Laura Cain. I'm the chief policy officer at US Fire, who you've already heard a bit about our organization. And our goal right now, excuse me, I'm getting over a bit of a cold. Our goal right now is to help you all learn from folks who are on the front line. So how much does this issue really matter? What is it? And how is it playing out for students and practitioners out in the real world? And how can their insight help shape your understanding and what you might choose to go do about it after we leave here today? So I'd like to introduce our panelists, and then we will have some opening comments from each of them. We have a few questions, and then we'll also open up for about 15 minutes of questions from the audience before we wrap up today. Great. So first off, I wanna introduce Elsa Martinez Pimentel. And she's the director. She's the program director. And site development manager at USPIRE. She helps manage both partnerships and advisors across Massachusetts to deliver advising around how to find an affordable path to and through a college degree. Elsa also understands our students very deeply because she herself was a frontline financial aid advisor since 2007 and also is an alumna of USPIRE and received services from USPIRE when she was in high school. Tom Beachide is the director of financial aid at Colorado State University, where he focuses on student-centered practices with his team. And he is formerly the president of the Colorado Association of Financial Aid Administrators. Lastly with us today is Kim Cook, who's the executive director at NCAN, the National College Access Network since 2008. And Kim has worked in higher education and college access for her entire career, including experiences as undergraduate admissions and financial aid, leading a scholarship program, as well as multiple roles at NCAN. And as a former Pell Grant recipient herself, she's personally committed to this work. So thank you so much for being here today. And we're gonna start off with having each of them share some opening reflections about how this experience plays out for them in their work, both with students and with practitioners. And so I've asked them to talk about that experience as well as thinking about why this problem is such an obstacle, why we should prioritize addressing it as a nation, and how it's a systems-level problem that is not something that could be addressed piecemeal. We'll go ahead and start off with Elsa. Great. Thank you very much. As Laura said, my name is Elsa Martinez Pimentel, and I've been with you ASPIRE for 11 years now. I started as a college affordability advisor, and then I transitioned to managing our frontline advisors and programs. And so I think, as I thought about what are kind of like the three things that resonated for me from the report, kind of throughout the whole entire time I kept thinking about how our students feel when they get that financial aid award letter, and we always say, like, let's celebrate, yes, but let's celebrate, and let's also, let's review and reflect on what you have in your hand. But most families are getting that letter and kind of getting really excited off the cuff and reading that final number that's on the bottom and kind of making a decision based on that. So three of the things that really resonated with me when I saw that report was the confusing jargon in particular, just because students will ask us 20 million times. Can you explain to me again what the unsub is? And is the unsub the same as the unsubsidized loan? And what does Fed mean or federal? And just the abbreviations and the confusing jargon. The bottom line cost, I think is a big deal, or the transparency around the cost of attendance. It's so hard to find it per se, even online. So a lot of our students are, even when we're looking for the cost of attendance, we're like calling colleges, they're like, no, the one posted is the old one. You have to look at this amount. Sometimes it's broken down by credits taken. So it's really hard to find the cost in general. So the fact that it's not on the letter is just a little detrimental. And I think the reason why it's so important and why this is kind of like a national problem is because we're already putting a lot of our students through the ringer with the college application process. I mean, you can think of like 13 steps that students have to take to apply to colleges. From application, if they don't take the common app, they have to fill out the own application, SATs, standardized testing, subject test. I mean, essays, numerous essays. And then we say financial aid and then there's 25 billion financial aid forms. So once you get to this final step after the 25 steps that you have to take to apply to college, it's still, we're saying now you have to decipher what you're actually gonna have to pay. So it is a national problem because of that reason. Thank you so much, Elsa. And we'll hear from Tom. Thanks, Laura. So in Colorado State University, I manage a financial aid office of over 40 staff right now. It's easy to get caught up in just the day to day operations of financial aid and administering aid. That's a challenge. So to stay connected with students and the experience for me personally, I have to be intentional about inserting myself in that space. So I spend time in our counseling center working with students on a weekly basis. I attend FAFSA nights, FSA ID nights. We now have verification nights. So getting in to high schools, working with students and families through that experience and so I feel connected. So, but it was this one particular case where I really, it was most enlightening to me about the problem that we're talking about here today. And I'll just speak briefly to that. There was a high school in Denver called Alameda International, predominantly underrepresented student serving high school. And I got a call from Desiree Wheeler, counselor, high school counselor there who said, hey, I have 15 students here that have been admitted to CSU. They have a word letter in hand and not one of them thinks they can come to CSU. And I knew that that particular group of students, in every case, the students could attend for less than the full amount of their subsidized loan with gift aid. So it was shocking to me at first. So I said, hey, Desiree, can you get all the students in a room together for about an hour? We'll come down and talk through it. And it was that experience that same week. We went down, met with the students, each student individually working, calculating, doing the math of the direct costs versus indirect costs, free aid versus loans, work study, how that all played out to get down to the bottom line and to watch the students' eyes light up when they actually got to that bottom line to see that they could afford Colorado State. That was a pretty key moment for me. And it underscored the work we needed to do on our own financial aid award letter because I always thought that when a student looked at it, it was that aha moment I can make CSU work when in fact what they saw was the total cost of tenants and they just shut down. And we were not on their minds at all at that point. So when I think about the experience, particularly for Desiree as a high school counselor, trying to talk students through not just our award letter but countless other award letters with no sense of consistency across any of them. The challenges that she faces day to day that became very apparent that we need to do some significant work on our own award letter to make it. So when a student looks at it, the first thing they think is truly aha, I can make it work. Thanks so much, Tom. Kim. Thanks, Laura. We at the National College Access Network appreciate the chance to be here today and have this conversation, particularly because we are practitioner driven. Our member programs work directly with their students and families, tackling issues about affordability and aid. So many thanks to you, Aspire, one of our superstar members for taking on this initiative that we often hear in the abstract. And we hear that affordability is a challenge. We hear that award letters don't make sense. And without looking at some of the examples that Rachel and her team put together for us, that can get swept under the carpet or misunderstood in the really specific ways like not calling alone alone. So for many of our students served by NCANN member programs who are first in their family to go to college, the aid day is decision day. This is where the students sort out and really come to a conclusion that they can or can't afford to continue their post-secondary education and make a decision about which institution will best support them, not just financially, but also academically and socially. But financial is a major driver for our students when they need to make this decision. So I think these letters and these actual real life samples show the challenges that our students face. And I like to think we're a room of smart people and I think we would all be challenged by reading these letters. Never mind high school seniors, even really smart high school seniors, navigating what this means. So many of our NCANN member programs spend a lot of time on the many steps that you pointed out, getting students to this point, whether it's application, search, FAFSA, verification, my favorite soapbox, but we've come through all those and we've gotten to the award letter. And again, this is decision day. So I think what you saw is a real challenge and a need for navigators and supports like access advisors, high school counselors, knowledgeable teachers and others, perhaps extended family members who can help to really sort out what's the bottom line? What do each of these mean? Where is a good deal? Where is affordable for me? We've unfortunately found that in our research, over 75% of public four year institutions are not affordable for the average Pell Grant student. 90% of the flagships are not affordable. So affordability is a real issue and I think what we see in some of these award offers and letters is an attempt to knit together everything we can, kind of throw the kitchen sink at it, to find every way to prove that there is a way to pay for college. Some of those we feel as you do in the report are misleading and don't help students make really informed decisions. But we realize the tremendous level of support and help that our students need to navigate a system that doesn't give the easy pieces that New America suggests like knowing your bottom line, knowing next steps to take, putting things in context as far as self-help. So we deeply appreciate this peak from a member perspective and real life that often is lacking, particularly here in the Beltway. When we talk about policy about why we need this issue, so I think this is a really tremendous paper that will have a lot of impact to show what's happening. You know, policy-wise it's an interesting conversation. You probably had more transparency about your breakfast cereal than your students have now. So if you think about nutrition labels, the HUD form, you know, other major purchases in life and minor purchases in life, there's more transparency and understanding about that than there are in these award letters. So I think this is a good conversation to start about how we can infuse more transparency and understanding for our students. So thank you again. Fantastic, thank you, Kim. So also we're gonna start with you with a few questions and you mentioned that confusing terminology in jargon is really difficult. Could you give us some examples? Yeah, so I think that what's interesting is that as you saw on some of the sample award letters is that some of the terms, like we say, oh yeah, like Google it or it'll be easy to kind of decipher what's on there. But I think that some of the examples are is abbreviations is a huge one. I mean, like why should we have to tell students that something is fed versus just saying it's a federal unsubsidized loan? The piece around institutional, like from what institution? Are you talking about this is coming from the college? Are you talking about this is another governmental institution granting this to me? So I think it's examples of the jargon that we use to explain multiple things in different ways. It's kind of like the really confusing thing that you're supposed to kind of figure out that one thing, whether it's a loan, whether it's the abbreviation of loan that it all means the same thing. And I think that that is the jargon that really gets students kind of mixed up. Also, for a lot of our students, they're not hearing a lot of these terms consistently or their families aren't. Some families haven't borrowed loans ever. They haven't borrowed a car loan. They haven't borrowed a home loan. They haven't really seen some of the lingo that's on these award letters. So to have the jargon that's kind of abbreviated versus not abbreviated, and to not be able to compare that easily amongst the award letters, I know our advisors sit there with the student and with the family, and you have to sit and explain everything that's on the award letter, plus then plug it in and break it down. So there's a lot of back and forth. Great, and it'd be helpful to share with the group here today about literally what you do when you sit with the family. So what tool do you bring to the table and what's that session look like when you're sitting with a student and or their family at the table to make sense of these financial aid offers? So I think that what's really neat and unique about you, Aspire, is that our advisors really are deciphering what's on the award letter first. So we're kind of talking with the student related to, this was the aid that you qualified for, let's make a call if there was something missing from the award letter, kind of explaining subsidized and unsubsidized, in most cases never has the interest rate on it, the amount that's being charged. So we're explaining that to the student, what does it really mean? How long will you have this loan for? And then we're actually plugging it into this really neat tool that we have that breaks everything down into the cost where we also add health insurance just to give an example to a student if they're leaving the state or if they don't have a family health insurance that they can transition to the college, we're putting that on there. We're also kind of breaking everything down, putting every single grant on the right line, highlighting that for them in a specific color, making sure that loans go into one space, any aid that shouldn't be on there, we're also looking at that separately. So work study, for example, we put on a different side of the page just so that the student isn't assuming that they have that money to pay. And then looking at that bottom line cost, so the big conversation is once we're done like deciphering and plugging everything in, we like print that out for the student and actually sit down and say, this is how much it'll be that you have to pay by August or if you start a payment plan in June and kind of break it down and say, this is how much it'll be long term if you go to this college for two years or four years. And we're really doing every single breakdown of long term cost and also immediate cost with that student and the family. And still at that, even when we go to that level, we still have so many questions from families that digest the information and say, okay, I have to go home and like think this through. And we still get so many questions about now I have this other award letter and I have no idea what's on here. So even after having such a useful tool because the jargon is so confusing, it's not that easy to plug it in to where it goes. One example in Massachusetts, we have students who receive the mass grants and they receive one chunk of the mass grants and then it's listed differently like the mass waiver on the bottom. It's a mass grant guys. So whether it's a waiver or it's a mass grant, why can't we just list it on the same line? So students will ask, what's the difference? Why is this being listed differently, et cetera. So those are just some examples. And the biggest piece is helping families make that emotional. It's the biggest decision of their lives, meaning that they're borrowing money. A lot of families are scared that they're gonna get into long term debt, especially because they just hear about, I wanna go to college, but I just don't wanna get into long term debt. And so it's really eliminating that fear and kind of guiding them through what's next. And this is a year to year process. A lot of people think, oh great, like you've explained it and they're enrolled and they got it. We actually run a summer program and it's to alleviate summer melt. And so we text message students who we've reviewed award letters with during the summer to make sure that they're matriculating and a lot of our students will say like, how much did you say I had to pay? And they're still confused. So even during the summer, our program is still critical to making sure that students get through and actually enroll. Great, thank you, Elsa. Tom, we'd love to hear from you about your experience recently at Colorado State where you chose to redo your award letter. So why did you do that? Although we heard a bit of that from your story, I think. And also what kind of things did you do and how's it going? Sure, yeah, that was, so based off that experience with that particular high school, that was the impetus for us to take a deep dive on our award letter. And I need to back up too and say that of the 15 students, we enrolled 14 of those students at CSU, so that one hour made a big difference. So, but it's such a challenge for students and families just to get to the bottom line. We saw that with our own experience and it kind of comes down to what's gonna show up on the bill for a student that first fall term. And it's, that seems easy. You know, there's aid and there's cost. Do that little subtraction and you should have what's gonna be out of pocket. But when you factor in direct versus indirect costs, that's gonna be different for every student. When you factor in gift aid versus loans versus what is the family saved, is the student working, all those other factors that can come in as resources, it's a very complicated process. So we took that whole kind of just that broad idea about all of those things and then just completely started from scratch with a new award letter. And we kind of broke our award letter into basically four separate parts. We start out with page one, basically why CSU is a good choice. Just some success data around students at CSU. Next page is the actual award letter. So we dive into direct versus indirect costs, very much more clearly defining those for students. And then separating the aid, gift versus the aid you have to pay back or the ED to work for. Separating work study and plus loans out, not common to them as awards. So those are just other resources available to the student. And then follow that into a budget worksheet because that's where we were doing the math with the students. So the next page is actually, so here's how much gift aid you have and the cost. What are your other resources you have available to get down to that bottom line out of pocket? What's it gonna cost? And then that again is not the end, it's next steps. So now that you've figured that out, how do you actually make all that happen? So then we have a series of bullet points basically on just step by step what you need to do next if you actually wanna attend the CSU. So that's, once we started diving into that just piece by piece, it started making a lot of sense and everything started to fit better. And it was based on those experiences, what we just actually did with students. So trying to match the experience of walking a student through it and have kind of a self guiding award letter versus one that requires someone to sit down and actually help you through was really key in making that change. Love it, self guiding award letter. It would be really helpful for you to share with us all about kind of the institutional perspective. It's so important, there's many stakeholders involved in this issue and institutions are right there at the center with students in many ways because you have the same goals as students and families do to have them graduate. So we'd love to hear about doing institutional change and how it was working with your staff and including working with some other departments on campus. Yeah that was, it's been a whole, first off whole office experience for us. Getting the perspective of all of our counselors, frontline counselors, our operations staff engaging them in really terminology and that's where we need to step aside from our day to day speak about financial aid and really try to talk about it from the perspective of parents and families. So a lot of just internal barriers that we needed to break down initially on how to rethink these things. But also taking time to engage students in this process and actually doing focus group with US Fire on the experience of the award letter with our very own students. And that was enlightening and engaging and students actually appreciated just the fact that they just stopped and asked. But what we gained out of that was incredible. And when you start looking down this path of changing just the award letter, when you start talking terminology, that starts to play through everything you do. It's all of our communications, it's our website, it's how admissions interacts with students when they talk about cost. We all need to align, we all need to say the same thing in words that students and families understand. So that's been engaging folks across campus. That has been really interesting to see how that's happened. And now it's actually starting to spread to the next step and I think we can talk about that a little bit later. But that's just within our division significant changes already in the works. Great, thank you. So Kim, would love to hear from you how this report resonated with some of NCANN's own research recently. They just submitted, I'm sorry, they just released a report called Shutting Out Low Income Students. That echoes a lot of our findings. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the connections. Sure, well, those are some of the connections I referred to in our research about affordability and the challenges that our students face. The Shutting Out Report looked at average Pell Grant recipients receiving average state aid, average student loans. So really putting together every piece that a student does to get to affordability, including the expected family contribution from a family and student, as well as summer work. So we really took every possibility and every avenue that you would go down that many of these letters also list other options, et cetera. We put it all together and compared that to the cost of attendance at public colleges across America and found that 75% of them are unaffordable using that definition. So students have serious challenges for affordability and that conversation and that stress is really driving a lot of the advising that we do and therefore advising a lot of our policy work. So we hear a lot in the policy world recently about simplification and simple aid. Clearly, NCANN is a strong advocate for simplifying the free application for federal student aid, which is the gateway form that brings you through federal, state and most institutional aid and gets you to this point of the award offer or award letter. We're also hearing rumblings about simplifying aid. We have some strong feelings on the simplification of aid in that that doesn't mean less of it. That just means perhaps different places and different ways of awarding combining programs perhaps but not eliminating programs to simplify aid. So I want to be clear about that. So there is some talk about simplicity. Laura, you were on a Senate panel and testified about award letters and I think gave a little peek at this work in progress on award letters and the challenges and that seems to have some traction to make these letters more standard, more understandable to students. So I think we'll continue to have those conversations and research like this gives a real window into the challenges that our students face as they tackle a larger affordability issue that we have in this country. Thank you. And as Rachel alluded to, there have been other efforts at standardization in the past. Curious about your insight, why you think that might not have taken hold. Why are we still, though there is a shopping sheet out there, why is Elsa and her team still facing lots of confusion out there from school to school in the field? Yeah, we should start by applauding the good guys and those who do follow things like the shopping sheet or standard terms and call alone alone and really go through processes like you did to revamp your award letter based on what you're hearing from students and they exist but there aren't enough of them. So we're hoping there are a couple ways to get at this. There's market pressure that this is where students really respond to these awards and these awards are a way of communicating to students that we're here to make this whole experience welcoming to you we want you as a student so there is some messaging and marketing that we hope happens. There is a window for a policy discussion about how we get at this simplicity and transparency. I'm not sure and I was saying to my fellow panelists back there this does not mean that the federal government will dictate that the upper left quadrant list gift aid and the lower right quadrant does the math for you but there could be some basics where the community comes together to agree on a voluntary basis or some lighter touch requirements that come from this report like you must call alone alone L-O-A-N loan. So there could be different ways to do that and I think the conversation around this would be interesting but it's really all fueled by the affordability challenge and how we're trying to patch together aid so that students can get to that bottom line and a message that they can go in their ways to support them. Just one side note on the policy piece we're talking about award letters and we're talking about the confusion but it's really unearthing the need for navigators and advisors to all students not just first gen or low income students but all students to understand they need help, they need advice there are too few access advisors too few community based organizations too few trained high school counselors too few other helpers whether they're coaches clergy mentors. There's a real need for students to navigate this and to understand how to calculate a bottom line and we could do a lot in the policy world to have a conversation about how we build that knowledge and capacity for students as well. Absolutely and one final question as there may be efforts to do more standardization and possibly from a policy angle hopefully from a policy angle what do you predict would be obstacles and what do you think are good strategies to overcome those? So to answer that question together I think this has to bring in an institutional voice and allow for flexibility for example more and more institutions now are communicating aid offers through a portal rather than the old fashioned letter in the mailbox and there are some dynamics that come with how many characters are available in each line and why LOAN ended up LO because they ran out of characters or something in the system. So I think some really common sense conversations about how to communicate that what's needed and how to get there it involves talking to the people not talking at and just legislating absent a conversation with those who are in the weeds and working on this from all sides. Absolutely thank you. So Tom I want to come back to you for a moment and ask you about what advice you would have to institutions I know we've already at US fire received lots of outreach from institutions and we're thrilled and we see institutions can be great partners in this effort and work. So what advice would you give to students considering to change the way they communicate with students about financial aid especially on the offer? Yeah first off just do it. That's a, it's interesting when you think about like the admissions letter you know when students get that admit letter there's huge fanfare and it's a great thing but the bottom line is on an admit letter it's you know it could be as simple as two check boxes yes or no. And for whatever reason we just have not given the award letter the spotlight like it should have because it is the key document that we as a financial aid office send out. It's the most important one. And yet for years, decades we have just ignored it completely. As long as the cost was there the awards were there we felt like we were meeting the you know federal guidelines that that was fine but it's such a huge event in a student's life particularly first gen low income that it's just shocking that we never took just a real critical lens to our award letter. So having done that it's just turned into a great experience for us internally our partners that we work with and more importantly our students and families and it's just phase one this revision we already have a whole host of phase two revisions in the works because again we learned so much by just starting to pay attention to the award letter so I think if you just take a little bit of time look at your award letter through the lens of the student a lot of things start to show up. Great thank you. And Elsa could you share with us I know the students who are able to work with you Aspire are so fortunate and this resonates with Kim's point about having support and advisors and counselors. What do you imagine is really hard for students who don't have a you Aspire advisor by their side? Where do you think they may get stuck the most? What do you think might be the hardest part? I think that I mean just listening to Tom's story I think that that's really what happens to our students nationwide. Like I think we have students who see that financial aid and say I cannot attend. Especially for first generation college students students whose families first language me I mean with all of the other obstacles to see something with that amount of money and that type of confusion it the first thought is I can't attend like it's not gonna be possible. We work at a school district in particular outside of Boston and most of the students 4.0, 4.5 you know top of their class go to the community college, the local community college. I mean these are students who get accepted to private colleges who can get in but they don't apply because of the cost. They say $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 I can't. My family can't, my parents can't afford this. I have to work part time to help support my family. So I think that that's really the obstacle that there isn't anyone that can support them in understanding that they can make it happen. I mean most of the conversations that our advisors are having with students is sitting down and looking at the alternative options, right? So we say here's your cost but if you don't get a scholarship to cover the 3,000 or the 5,000 that you have as a gap, what can we do? Can you live off campus? Can you attend a community college for the first year and then transfer? So we're looking at all of these alternate options to really make sure the student selects something right after graduating but most students that don't have that type of guidance just say I can't and I'm not going to. And I think that's the biggest obstacle that we face. Thank you. Kim, you want to add on? Yeah, if I may. To build on that, we have a lot of students who unfortunately say I can't because they don't have an advisor or navigator with them to understand what the options are or what else they can do. We do have some who bravely and with all the confidence that we instill in them say I can and they do. And that brings us to another key policy issue that we're having which is a completion issue. And there's a lot of hand wringing now about how is it that we lose 50% of our first time full time students? This is a key reason why because they take a chance. They take all the confidence in everything we've told them and instilled in them and say I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna be the 10%, I'm gonna be the 50%, I'm going to succeed and they go to an institution where they're not informed, don't quite understand what that financial aid commitment that they're making is between their expected family contribution, their loan taking, perhaps the expected parent loan taking and they try to knit it together and they throw the Hail Mary pass for year one and they realize that they come up short and there's no way that they can do year one, never mind years two through possibly six or seven. So this really in a policy world is broad in that it really fuels a completion issue that we have as well. So I'd like to throw that out on the table that sometimes we just try to duct tape and bubble gum it together for year one and realize that it's not sustainable but that's part of a lack of understanding and knowing what they're getting into financially. Absolutely, I was a practitioner in schools for years and we often saw like you can't bootstrap it if you don't have boots. And just one quick anecdote that resonates at the network where I led college initiatives. We had a student at one school who had a $17,000 gap to attend a private school in Ohio. We were located in Philadelphia and this student had a dean who was an alum from that private institution who was very excited and highly emotionally committed to go to this school. So they created a GoFundMe page for $17,000 for their bill for the first year and it's went viral around the school community and then it came pretty quickly to my desk. And at that point I was being trained by you Aspire with my team and right away, we did not have the awesome job student way to go solve that problem. I had the gut wrenching nauseating feeling of saying we have failed to advise the student well. There's no way you're gonna GoFundMe your way through four years of college. Like I knew I'm like this student will either transfer or they're gonna stop out, pause out or they're gonna be into fall like right away. Like this is what would keep me up at night and then it took a lot to even to Tom's point about systems change. We had to work with that dean, with that principal, with that school versus everyone sending it out to get 25 bucks for that student. We had to say this actually isn't a viable solution and you have 125 other seniors there who now might think it is. So I think the messaging and the idea of how much affordability, it's not what it costs to start, it's what it costs to finish and we need to be clear about what those costs are with students at every step of the way for them and their families to make smart consumer financially informed decisions. And Elsa on that note, would you talk a little bit about, a little bit more about the work in the summer? Cause often it seems like what the cost might be in April might look a little different come July and August with different pieces of paper coming to the student or different emails and portal messages. Yeah, so I think that a lot of our students, I mean, one thing is, is that the cost may vary for some schools the cost that we calculated kind of in the spring, right? Because in particular for state schools, they might not have their final costs till around the summertime. So that's one component as well. Students we've estimated, students have estimated an award or hopefully have reviewed that with someone and the exact cost may not even come until during the summer. So a lot of students get these emails of all of the steps that they have to complete or an orientation they're learning about all of these new things that are coming up and we text throughout the whole summer. Have you gone to orientation? Have you registered for classes? Have you waived your health insurance? Have you done all of these steps to make sure you matriculate? And sometimes students will be silent until August. The bills do and they're like, hell, every student's like freaking out. Like I just got a bill. It's not the bill that, it's not how much I thought I had to pay. Can you please help me figure this out? I'm not going to the school anymore. I don't have enough to make that work. So I think that that's one of the hurdles that students are facing, that during the summer there's so much change in particular for students that have estimated one thing and that those things can change down the line. The one thing that I was going to mention is that I think that this is a very emotional part of the process. This is the most emotional part of the whole college application process. It's not just applying and getting accepted or denied. It's really making like your dream school or this kind of like the dream, the American dream of like actually attending college happen and that we get to a point where we're kind of like, where people are making the biggest decisions of their lives and we don't have anything standardized. I mean, this is kind of like, there was mortgage reform, there was credit card reform and student loan debt is the highest. Amongst all types of debt in the United States and we still haven't addressed this issue. We allow students to continue to borrow, to continue to attend college and to freely believe that this college degree is gonna get them a lot of money and that they're gonna live happily ever after and that it's all as long as they borrow and they attend and they complete, everything's gonna be great and dandy. And we know that's not the case. So we need to at least provide transparency so that this emotional step is a little bit less emotional and so that the families also make in the decision that they're really informed about. Thank you, thank you very much. And so at a couple different points in this conversation, we've tapped into elements of financial literacy. So Kim, I'd love to hear a little bit about why you think financial literacy could be connected and in play, especially from a policy perspective given some of the information that Elsa just shared about the scale of our current student loan debt issue. Right, financial literacy is certainly at play. This is a major financial decision. When we talk about NCANN's constituency and the students and families we primarily serve, these are pretty staggering numbers and unusual in that many of our families have not made major purchases like a car or a house. So this is really the first major purchase and understanding, repayment, loans, et cetera. That goes a long way. I think financial literacy is put out as a bandaid that it is not, though. This is not that I don't understand the problem. This is because there is a problem. So I think explaining a loan and repayment, unfortunately many of our families understand that very well. They understand loans very well. They take them for a variety of reasons. So this is not because this is a group that doesn't understand how to pay for things or what a loan means and that it must be paid back. Financial literacy is always good. It can go a long way to understanding, particularly to helping our students make decisions when they're on their own and they're away from a family unit that's been very supportive and made decisions together as a family. So when that student goes to campus and understands credit cards, which we've tackled in many ways but still exist as an issue for taking additional loans, how they use their money, perhaps they get a loan refund that's really meant for books and direct expenses, but how to responsibly use that, that's important. But at some points it gets almost insulting to suggest that financial literacy is why we have this problem. We have an affordability problem. We don't have, it's not that we don't understand it, it's that we have a problem. So there is some, we could all, everyone in this room, benefit from some financial literacy and better understanding and smarter decisions, but that doesn't erase this issue or these challenges. All right, thank you. At this time I'd love to open up the floor to questions from the audience. I believe we have a microphone. This is being recorded for others who aren't able to be with us today in person and would love to have you introduce yourself and then offer the question to the panel. Hi, some Clark from the Education Writers Association. I wondered if the fellow from Colorado State could explain why you didn't just use the standard, federal standard financial aid letter. Why did you have to invent your own? Oh, so the shopping sheet. That we do produce the shopping sheet because we did sign on with the Department of Defense, that executive board. No, we provide it to everyone. So it's available through the portal. We don't send it to students per se. Because we can't get to the level of detail that we feel like we need to with our current award letter. And even with the shopping sheet in the past, it still wasn't getting down to the estimated bill, which is the bottom line for students like it should. I think accounting for other resources, those types of things, it just wasn't doing it as well as we thought we could do it, so. I'm Frank Ballman with the National Association of State Student Granted Programs. So many of our members are also members of Kim's organization as well. I wanna talk about loans a little bit because if any of us takes out a mortgage or a car loan or credit card, there's truth and lending disclosure and all of that. But for some reason, federal student loans are exempt from truth and lending. So if you look at a prom note, at least the last time I looked at federal prom note, there's no interest rate, there's no rich nation fee listed. Doesn't tell you what the monthly payment will be. And there's several state programs actually focus on doing that. And as a result, people borrow less or sometimes they don't borrow. So I'm wondering if any of the panel wants to talk about whether federal student loans should be subject to truth and lending. And I'll also note that some states have a test at the end of their entrance counseling. And when you have a test at the end, the default rate is much, much lower than it is without. Great, I'll respond quickly and let my panelists think for a moment and just lean in if you'd like to respond. So first off, your latter point is part of the U.S. Buyer's Policy Agenda in that improving the impact of loan counseling and assessment of understanding with the loan counseling. That that's a great opportunity system-wide to help provide students the key information that they need and to your point can help affect the outcomes on the other end. And in terms of the truth and lending, we absolutely agree. We believe that whether the award letter is the moment to give every piece of detail, I think from our experience, it's a little bit of drinking from a fire hydrant for students and families often, but being sure that it is scaffolded in a clear way, such as I know folks like Colorado State is thinking where and when we deliver the key pieces of level of detail of information in a strategic way to students and families. And so absolutely we believe that in essence, the truth and lending is exactly the spirit of what we're going after here. I would also add that I think the truth and lending is probably critical, even more critical for parent plus loans. I mean, you have parents who are approved because they don't have adverse credit. And so they have probably been on social security maybe. I have some cases, their whole lives, they don't have a lot of income and they can borrow $30,000, $50,000 a year. So you're talking about a family that may have very small income. And so how, where's the truth and lending? Do they know that what this is gonna look like long term, the origination, all of those things are really critical in particular for that parent and for that family long term? Absolutely. And the plus loan also has a much higher origination fee than the student loans, a north of 4%. And as a result, if you're a student or who has the lucky position of having a parent who is willing and able to contribute in that way to their education, when you're literally doing the math on the budget sheet, you may miss that that's 4%. Sometimes these are five figures. So that 4% really adds up quickly. And then students face the risk without clear costs and being able to budget appropriately with facing food and housing insecurity without being able to meet their needs to buy school supplies and books, et cetera. And we have many cases of that example, which again ties right to completion and the reality of their ability to pay back whatever they choose to borrow. Hi there, I'm Adam Nixon, professor at the University of Maryland. A lot of my students deal with food insecurity. And so I wonder, they're getting in. Are they starving themselves when they finally make it and they try to patch together a financial plan? Thank you. Sure, so I... Kim, did you want to go? So Sarah Goldrick-Rob, who has been leading the Hope Lab which was recently at University of Wisconsin and is shifting right now. I think it's about to reopen at Temple University, has done some phenomenal leading research that's longitudinal, looking at these issues. And the numbers are staggering in terms of upwards of one third of students facing food insecurity and north of 15 to 20% depending upon which population to your school, for your school, facing housing insecurity and homelessness. So this is absolutely a very real issue that I think we are just starting to get a better line of sight on in terms of the reality. I can say that we conducted six different student focus groups as part of this research for the paper with my colleagues from USFIRE and Colorado State and other partners. And students did bring up how unexpected expenses such as parking, such as transportation, science books in particular, really did lead them to run out of money around November, right? So it's very much actually right when the holidays are kicking in, they get hungrier and they make choices about how do I make certain trade-offs at this time. We have student examples, which we've cited in previous testimony where students had to drop out because they weren't able to get particular science books. Also an issue right now that USFIRE is leaning to start looking into for some of our future work next year is around open educational resources. Now this day and age with the internet as it is, students told us many stories about how they buy a used book, but the code that they need to be able to complete their homework for their class is another 150 bucks. So they thought they already budgeted, they bought the used book, they did everything that you would think, being frugal and on the ball, gets them where they need to go and then they still faced challenges to even be able to complete the class. So I think there's many issues within here that relate to trade-offs. When the budget is tight, the budget is tight. Yeah, we almost... The number was almost, it was near 70% of the students felt at some point in their career, food and security. So I was stunned. I didn't realize that that was happening in that space. Thank you. Can I add to that? Yes, Kevin and Tom. So you bring up a very real challenge for most of our students, quite frankly. I'd use the word most and I appreciate your overview of the excellent research. I think to bring it back to a conversation about financial aid, packages, aid and award letters, this is a lot of what's built into that nebulous expected family contribution, which is another conversation that we can have about these award letters that many of our students have some number that goes into that unmet need column that cascades this whole conversation. Some number that they and their family are expected to contribute, which is often very hard to understand. And that number may be where, so if they have a $2,000 or $3,000 expected family contribution, that could easily be grocery shopping. So there's a lot that goes into this aid package that we have to look at. We ask for cost of attendance. In our research about affordability, we also included expected family contribution. That's the number that catches up with them on the back end and that food insecurity and housing insecurity is a major way that manifests. Thank you. Tom, did you want to? Yeah, along the food insecurity lines. We have at CSU, we have all the quantitative data we need to indicate it's a real problem. We have a program called Rams Against Hunger that students can apply for, essentially anonymously online. And then we check need through our office and then they have money added to their CSU ID so they can just swipe at any of the cafeterias on campus. Works great, but also there's a lot of students that participate in that program. We also have data from our county's food bank. So we know it's a huge problem. Where we finally started doing some work that was more on the qualitative side and actually talking to students about when is this happening for you? For example, with undocumented students, my experience has been towards the end of the semester, they may be working two, three jobs to make up the gap for loss of federal aid and state aid. So they're working so hard, but as they prep for finals, they have to back off their hours. So they're left either paying rent or buying food. You gotta stay, you gotta keep your apartment so the rent gets paid, no money for food. So there's these key points in time, I think that we're starting to identify as areas where I think we could step up and do something programmatically to make sure that that doesn't happen. And just other things like dispersing maybe some type of aid monthly versus all at once up front, just to help students in that capacity. That's another thought, but definitely a real problem that we just need more data. Absolutely, and the transparency matters right up front for the planning purposes. Thank you. It's very similar with Community College Access Network, three things. Number one, in Virginia, we have a legislatively mandated study of award letters with the hopes of creating some type of not mandated template, but with some agreement within the community. In fact, the study mandates that it's a discussion with the community, as Kim described earlier, talking with, not at. So, and that's been going on for about a year and we hope maybe in the next six to eight months to have some conclusions on it. Number two, on the business of financial literacy, I agree there's a lot of that out there, but what it's not on, and I think many of the comments have been pepper the issue of budgeting in financial literacy, of having to budget over a period of time and the comprehensive nature of what you have to budget, because when you look at that cost of education, as Tom talked about on the award notice, it can be rather shocking and the students need to understand that it includes a lot of stuff and in their regular life they should be budgeting and perhaps they haven't been doing that in their former lives with their family. Question for the panel. There are many competing priorities in higher education, the most of which now is, I think, to some degree transparency and enrollment. What I mean by enrollment is competition for students. Many colleges and universities are feeling the student's squeeze, they're really out there trying to make their institution look the most favorable, the most attractive and they're not necessarily from the financial aid community but from other administrative communities on campuses, some resistance to being transparent with the total cost of attendance and everything or a realistic cost of attendance. How do you manage, how do we convince the other areas of higher education administration of the need for this transparency where you have that competition for students? I would actually like to start by answering that question and I think that after being in this work for 11 years and working directly with students, students will select a college that they love regardless of the circumstances. Sometimes they will, I mean the parents, the students will do everything in their power to make it work. I think that the real issue here is that if schools are more transparent, I think that students are able to, they're gonna select the college regardless, whether they have to commute, whether they have to start part time, if they really love the college. So I think that that fear is really coming from the fact that at the end of the day, once summer starts or they get that bill in August, the student really has to just put up their hands and say, I can't select that college because I don't have any way to make that happen. I just don't know how I'm gonna make it happen. So there's so much around the transparency that if students have all of the information that they need to really make that decision, they're gonna make it regardless if they have to alter the circumstances. I mean we work with so many students from, I mean their parents have gone to college or their parents are pushing a college or they really fall in love with a college and I think that this piece around students really loving the college that they're gonna be attending is always there regardless of how much we explain the repercussions of having really high debt. So I think that the issue really comes at the end of the day when a student's really making that financial decision, when it wasn't clear and transparent from the start, a lot of students just have to put their hands up and make another decision. And that's where we see it happening the most is during the summer, summer college connect is where students are saying, I thought I was going to that school, that's where they, when they fill out our exit survey, they mark that they're gonna be living on campus, that they're gonna be attending a certain school and then something during the summer that either because of the bill or that wasn't quite clear about what they have to pay really throws that student off. Thank you and Tom, do you wanna add anything from the institution perspective on that? Sure, I think ultimately it manifests itself in your success data from that transparency perspective and I think Laura mentioned that earlier about if you're not giving the truth up front, chances are you're gonna stop out and it shows up and I think I'm fortunate to work at an institution that is as committed to success as it is to access. Finally, we have not always been there, this is just in the last few years, but being transparent is key in those success data that ultimately tell the tale, so. Right, thank you. Other questions from the audience? So my name's Jamise, I'm from NKN and so this might more so be a question for Elsa. How do you all help students understand work study? I know in my experience I was awarded work study but I had to notify and find the job to get work study so how do you help students navigate that? Yeah, so I think that that's still something that we're learning about. It's such a hard thing, what we spend most of our time doing is helping the student understand that there's a lot of steps to getting to the work study component, we say here's money that you're eligible for before, this is what you have to do when you go to orientation, ask the right questions, et cetera. So we spend a lot of time during the summer and also one of the components is we also have a succeed program which text messages students during the school year and that's really where once they enroll in college and what we're trying to really do is make sure that students are taking advantage of visiting the right centers, their work study jobs, where do you apply, where do you find those jobs? So really students are kind of lost and we'll say you wanna ask these questions at orientation or here's where you can find them on the website but they're so different college to college on how you can get a work study job and I think the first step for most of our college affordability advisors is helping the student navigate what the process is for their school but we'll always say to the student, this is not money that you have upfront, this is like getting a job anywhere else off campus, you can apply it for your expenses or for your cell phone bill or for your food, et cetera but this is a job that you have to apply for and make sure that you're on top of any other job. They're not just gonna offer it to you when you get on campus and that's the really big deal. Yeah. And even the terminology for work study is so important, I've had countless students like, oh, so they're gonna give me that grant, they're gonna give me that scholarship because I'm gonna work hard studying and that's not to belittle the students, work and study, you work hard when you study, it's not a bad assumption if you haven't heard of the program, it's totally fair and in essence, it's just employment which is important and they want jobs and there's great things about the impact for completion around federal work study, we're very big proponents of it at US Fire and support it from a policy level but how it's communicated, which is a lot of what today is about is very, very critical and just as Elsa said, even before all that awesome support in the summer, it's very clearly when we do the analyzer, that tool where we do an apples to apples comparison, we make sure that work study is not in that math, that is helpful for indirect expenses and we talk about that on the side about how that can help given the timing of it, the additional requirements and then the literal distribution, the dissemination of those funds. That's exactly how we present work study to students and families in the college decision process, tying it to a cost, we tie it to the indirect costs, particularly personal miscellaneous costs, buying shampoo, soap, doing laundry, things you need money for. Work study is a great thing, a great form of financial aid to fill that cost item. Great, we have time for one more final question. I have, I'm sorry, thank you. Amanda from the National Governors Association. So I haven't gotten a chance to read all of the research yet but it seems like a no-brainer concept to provide more transparency for students. Should this be something that comes down from federal? Is this, should this bubble up from institutions making these changes? Are there any rules that states can play? We heard Virginia, I guess it has an effort going on right now. What is your opinion, the panelist's opinion about where this solution should come from? Sure, I'm gonna go ahead and take this one. So it's yes, yes and yes. So in essence, if one school does a great job with it and there are many schools that are doing phenomenal things like Colorado State, that's fantastic for those students. But all students, all consumers, the 1.3 billion dollars a year that is distributed by the federal government should be protected by clear communication across the board. So we believe different systems change, takes different amount of time but doing the work to find the common terms with student-friendly, simple definitions on half a page, not on 10 pages of financial aid lingo which basically means it's not explaining anything. So the common terms, less than 10 of them short definitions and then what we lay out as the five key practices about not mixing aid, gift aid and loans, about always including costs with the breakdown of indirect and direct costs and doing the math, making that effort as an institution, as a state and as the federal government we believe is required. This should be standard across the board. Whether it's one exact form is an open question but absolutely those key terms, the definitions and the core practices standard across the board. On that fine note, which is a perfect conclusion of our paper and of this conversation, would you please thank the panelists with me? And I invite Bob Giannino, CEO of USPIRE to come up and close us out for today. Thank you Laura and thank you to our panelists. Have another hand for our panelists today. Thank you, great conversation. I'm just here to close us out. I have a few thank yous to provide. First, I'd like to make sure that we thank the Kresge and Jack Kent Cook Foundations for their support of this project and the partnership between USPIRE and New America. I'd also like to make sure that we recognize and thank a number of partners who made this work come to life, in particular helping us with student focus groups and helping to build a sort of on the ground take of the issues that not having transparent financial aid award letters lead to. Our friends at Colorado State University, Mastery Charter Schools, Philadelphia Futures, Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, and TECIS, the Institute for College Access and Success. I too like Rachel would like to thank the Lumina Foundation for being the broker of this relationship and introducing us and allowing for this to come to life. And very much wanna thank and appreciate our friends at New America for this partnership. It has been an incredible opportunity to work with you all. We hope that this is the beginning of many opportunities for us to bring our unique expertise together and also for hosting us here today. And then lastly, I'd like to thank my team at USPIRE for the amazing work that each and every one of our team members does every day to help young people and families navigate these challenging pathways to a college degree. So with that, thank you all for coming. Thank you on the live stream for watching. We appreciate it.