Recap: College Costs & Debt in the 2020 Elections

The Department of Education recently released a new, more user-friendly version of its College Scorecard website, which is an important consumer resource that provides key information about college costs and student outcomes. Alongside improvements to the website’s user interface, including features that let students more easily compare different institutions, federally...

On October 31, the House Committee on Education and Labor passed the College Affordability Act (CAA), a comprehensive proposal to reauthorize the Higher Education Act.

Claiming to protect students and hold colleges accountable, on Friday the Department of Education finalized its so-called borrower defense rule. The rule allows students to seek to cancel student loans connected to fraud and other illegal activity by their colleges.

The Education Department just announced its final gainful employment (GE) rule repealing protections that have led to lower costs for students attending career programs and big savings for taxpayers. By eliminating the protections of the rule, unscrupulous schools will be able to enroll as many students as possible at as high a price as the student loan system will support.

Affordability is a key issue for many students and families when choosing which colleges to apply to and attend, but the financial aid process can seem overwhelming. At the recent NCAN conference in Pittsburgh, TICAS and uAspire shared specific ways that counselors can help students and families approach the issue of college affordability and understand their financial aid options.

At the national conferences last week for the National College Access Network (NCAN) and National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), I joined forces with uAspire’s Erica Rose and Bernadette Astacio to share counselor tips to help students and families understand financial aid, throughout the college decision process. We discussed how to help students decide...