How much will I pay for college? Financial aid offers are very confusing
- Joanne Jacobs
- Apr 26
- 2 min read
May 1 is college decision day for students who hope to earn a bachelor's degree. Many will decide based on affordability: Including financial aid, which college is the best value?
Yet, financial aid letters can make it hard to figure out the final cost, writes Hechinger's Meredith Kolodner. College-access advocates "have been lobbying for a bill in Congress that would require all colleges to use the same, clearly labeled, standard form — kind of like nutrition labels on food — so families could accurately compare offers," she writes. "But college associations and others have worked to block it."
Eighteen-year-olds and their parents are making very big decisions based on confusing and sometimes misleading information. Many do not have the financial savvy to evaluate the trade-offs.
Nearly half of 2026 high school graduates will go on to a four-year college or university, according to a new NerdWallet report, reports Jessica Dickler for CNBC. More than a million will take out student loans that will lead to $43,000 in debt, on average, by graduation.
Whether that's worth it depends on whether borrowers actually complete a degree -- many do not -- and whether they major in engineering or theater arts.
Americans now hold $1.7 trillion in federal student loans. Trump's "big beautiful bill” has cut repayment options and set stricter rules for debt forgiveness. "New borrowers will have a total lifetime limit of $257,500 for all federal student loans," writes Dickler.
Cato's Andrew Gillen identifies "policies that would save more than $265 billion over the next 10 years, including eliminating subsidized loans, eliminating or capping Public Service Loan Forgiveness, modifying the Repayment Assistance Plan, phasing out campus-based aid, repealing ineffective tax expenditures, and benchmarking research overhead rates."
'"New borrowers will have a total lifetime limit of $257,500 for all federal student loans," writes Dickler.'
Oh, the humanity!
Deciding how to enter in to life crippling debt. Now with the degree even more useless as all, in the know, predict their AI will take all the jobs. Well, the ones college graduates were hired for in the past. But many programs do train their students to be activists and useful idiots for the "cause".
And remember, President Obama told us that one in five women who attend college will be sexually assaulted during the 4 years she's on campus. There's no evidence that the situation has improved, except that there are fewer men on campus over the last decade.