Since it is spring, the time college admissions offers are released, Rachel Fishman shares her research on financial aid award letters, specifically her findings about the complexity and lack of consistency with the language in the letters.
Fishman, a financial aid policy expert at New America, explains, “One of the most common federal loans you are going to find in almost every financial aid package is the the federal unsubsidized student loan. Of the 500 letters that we looked at from unique colleges and universities, there were 136 different ways that institutions were calling this loan and 24 most concernedly did not call them loans.”
Listen to the podcast here.
This podcast is created and produced by higher education experts Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn. Selingo, a FutureEd senior fellow and former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, is special advisor and professor of practice at Arizona State University, and a visiting scholar at Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities. Horn is chief strategy officer for the Entangled Group, an education investment firm, and a senior partner at Entangled Solutions, an education consulting company. Selingo and Horn can be contacted here. Future U is supported by the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership, a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University, and by Entangled Solutions.
