Increasing college cost and value transparency for students and families

Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, released a Request for Information on Sept. 30, 2025, to garner feedback from stakeholders on ways to improve transparency in higher education to lower costs and ensure students and families choose the best college option for them.

Strada President and CEO Stephen Moret, in coordination with the organization’s Affordability and Policy Solutions teams, offered these insights to help inform the committee's work as it moves to address the presented issues.

This is the text of Moret’s letter to Cassidy:

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Dear Senator Cassidy: 

Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback on identifying bipartisan solutions to improve transparency of college pricing, financial aid, and value. This letter is a response to your Request for Information (RFI), “Increasing College Cost and Value Transparency for Students and Families.” 

At Strada Education Foundation, we’re focused on one goal: strengthening the connection between education and opportunity in the U.S., especially for those with the most standing in their way. For too many young people, the end of high school brings uncertainty rather than hope. They join countless adults struggling to figure out the best path to a fulfilling career and life, unsure whether investing in more education is the safest bet. At the same time, employers can’t find the talent they need, and thousands of good jobs go unfilled. Capable learners and eager employers are searching for each other in a system with too many walls and not enough doors.

Strada works at the intersection of education, workforce, and employment systems to help more Americans connect learning with meaningful work and economic mobility. In collaboration with educators, employers, and policymakers, we identify and scale solutions that: make the costs of postsecondary education more affordable and transparent for learners; increase participation in education-to-career coaching and paid work-based learning experiences; strengthen education-to-employment data systems so learners and policymakers can make informed choices about postsecondary education programs (including but not limited to degrees); and ensure that all learners can access programs leading to strong earnings outcomes in fields that meet employer demand. We advance this work through actionable research, catalytic grantmaking, strategic investments, public policy solutions, and technical assistance, as well as through the work of our nonprofit affiliates (e.g., CredLens and Roadtrip Nation). 

While we are providing the information below as a formal response, we would be happy to explore these and other areas in greater depth to assist in meeting your goals.

Policy Goals 1 and 3: Price Transparency and Financial Aid Offers 

Price clarity is foundational to affordability – it enables learners and families to make informed choices, budget realistically, and believe the system is working for them rather than against them. Without it, learners lose hope and opportunity, and our nation loses talent and economic competitiveness. 

College pricing today is confusing and opaque. In a 2024 nationally representative Strada survey, only a quarter of adults could correctly identify that the average tuition and fees at a community college are roughly $5,000-$10,000. Unfortunately, 1 in 5 respondents thought community college costs more than $20,000 a year. When asked about costs at four-year in-state public institutions, where researchers included housing and meals to better represent an on-campus experience, just 1 in 5 adults (22%) could correctly identify the average cost as between $20,000-$30,000 per year. Most people (56 percent) overestimated the cost, with about 1 in 5 (21 percent) dramatically overestimating it to be more than $50,000 a year. 

Strada recently conducted focus groups to better understand perspectives about college pricing and transparency. While the results have not yet been published, we found that learners and families are asking for four things: 

• Price guarantees: Families want costs they can count on from start to finish, with no surprise fees. Forty-three percent of traditional college students said a guaranteed cost for all four years would make college more affordable, and 37 percent of adult learners said guaranteed prices would help them make a college decision. 
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• Clarity and simplicity: Families are extremely frustrated with opaque pricing practices and what they perceive as “hidden fees.” They want clear, all-in pricing. In our research, 32 percent of adult learners and 33 percent of college parents identified single, all-in pricing as one of the top three ways (out of 16 options) to make college more affordable. 
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• Commitment to limiting debt: Families used vivid, visceral language to describe their fear of student loans, portraying debt not as a tool but as a life-crippling burden. Nearly half of adult learners (47 percent) and traditional college students (43 percent) said a school’s promise to keep debt low would be decisive in their decision to enroll. While increasing concerns about student loan debt have been well-documented, it is also important to provide quality education-to-career coaching and relevant data so students can clearly see the potential return on investment (ROI) of taking on debt for a credential with good returns.
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• Clear connection to ROI: For today’s students, affordability is about whether the benefits, like employment and earnings, outweigh the costs. Nearly three out of four high school (73 percent) and college (71 percent) students said it is more important that college is “worth the price” than that it is simply “fairly priced.” Clear price information and outcomes information together allow families to make informed choices about value. 

Recommendations to address these issues include: 

• ‍Support simplification and standardization of institutional financial aid award letters: Many forward-thinking colleges have already taken a step toward this goal by signing on to the College Cost Transparency (CCT) Initiative, a partnership supported by Strada and led by higher education associations and institutions, to ensure transparency, understanding, and clarity around student financial aid offers. The initiative goes beyond a pledge. An independent reviewer examines financial aid offers to ensure schools are correctly using standardized terms and language. Today, more than 730 institutions enrolling 7 million students in all 50 states have voluntarily agreed to these standards. Collectively, these institutions address inconsistencies that have been identified by this Committee and meet the best practices from a 2022 GAO report and the U.S. Department of Education’s Shopping Sheet. 
  
  Federal efforts to standardize financial aid offers should build on these voluntary efforts by focusing on consistent language and definitions that improve clarity, rather than expanding the content of financial aid offers to include excessive or tangential information. Starting with the principles and standards from the CCT Initiative can provide a clear and practical roadmap for federal standardization efforts. 
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• Require that program-level outcomes be paired with prices. Because affordability is inseparable from clear outcomes, prices should be paired with program-level outcomes, including overall loan debt and a robust set of employment outcomes (e.g., range of typical earnings and the most common occupations), whenever possible. In addition, institutions should ensure that, from the beginning of a postsecondary program, students have access to quality coaching that helps them understand and use these data to make informed choices about borrowing, program selection, and long-term return on investment. 
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• Clarify safe harbors for collaborative transparency practices while maintaining guardrails against price-fixing. Today, if a large group of institutions were to come together and commit to transparent pricing through actions such as all-in pricing, tuition resets, and standardized price guarantees, they would likely be investigated for potential collusion. Concerns about collusion and anticompetitive practices are real in any market. Yet colleges and universities also need some supervised ability to collaborate and commit to best practices that are not anti-competitive but instead serve students and families. 

Exploring Better Use of Net Price Calculators

Despite the availability of federal tools like the College Scorecard, students and their families are not utilizing or effectively internalizing estimated net price information. Strada’s research makes this clear: few Americans have an accurate sense of what it actually costs to attend postsecondary education. Even with data readily available, most still dramatically overestimate the price of college.

The question students and families are asking is: What will college cost me? What’s needed is better, personalized information delivered throughout the college exploration and enrollment process. Imagine that students and families had access to tools as early as 8th or 9th grade, before they make critical high school course decisions, that show what their family might actually pay to attend local or state colleges and universities. Imagine, too, that later, when students receive direct admission offers, they simultaneously receive an accurate, personalized net price estimate about what it will actually cost to attend institutions in their state.

This sort of innovation could become a reality, if not at the national level, then certainly through accurate institutional net price calculators or state partnerships. Today, institutional net price calculators can be difficult to find or vary in their methodology and usefulness. Another challenge is aggregation. Today, students need to visit each institution separately to find and use a net price calculator. Ensuring that this information is available in one easily accessible place would be much more helpful.

Strada is currently exploring how states can partner with institutions to deliver just such personalized information to students and families within their state throughout the college exploration and enrollment process. Whether such a tool can ultimately be deployed at the federal level, given existing data restrictions, remains uncertain. But there are promising models in development today that show what a universal, personalized net price calculator could make possible using existing institutional datasets at the state level.

Policy Goal 2: Value Transparency 

Too many learners, including those attending institutions of higher education and those enrolled with private providers as Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) participants, complete their education or training only to find that it doesn’t lead to a well-paying job and opportunities for growth. A report published by Strada in 2024 shows that only about half of bachelor’s degree graduates who go directly into the labor market secure employment in a college-level job within a year of graduation. And a 2023 report by The Project on Workforce found that our public workforce development training dollars through WIOA are being used to train workers in low-wage occupations that do not promote economic development. 

Both higher education and the workforce system share a common problem: insufficient information about employment outcomes to inform future program decisions and learner choice. Take for instance the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. While this is a valuable tool, it has two major flaws: 1) it only includes learners who received federal financial aid (leaving out a large share of the overall learner population); and 2) the only type of employment outcomes available is earnings, and these data aren’t available for all programs within an institution of higher education. What’s missing entirely is information showing, by program, the most common occupations and industries that completers enter. This information is critical for helping learners and policymakers understand program outcomes and career relevance. These same limitations will also be important to address for short-term, workforce-oriented programs that will become eligible for Workforce Pell Grants in the coming years.

Today, the federal government (and most states) can’t answer these basic questions: 

• What are the typical hourly earnings outcomes of each postsecondary education program, including all completers (not just those who received federal financial aid)?
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• What share of completers secure a high-wage job aligned with their education and/or training? 

• Are completers with low quarterly wages in low-paying jobs, or is it because they are working part-time? 
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• Are public investments in education and/or training programs producing the desired benefits? 

Likewise, the federal government and nearly all states can’t answer more advanced but equally important questions, such as: 

• What is the return on investment (accounting for all costs and debt incurred) of specific programs?
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• Which initial post-completion occupations represent dead ends, and which ones are launchpads to upward mobility? 
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• To what extent are postsecondary education and training programs addressing unmet talent needs of employers versus preparing people for jobs in short supply?
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• What portion of college graduates are able to secure a college-level job, by college and degree program? 
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• Which programs produce the largest wage gains for low-income individuals? 

Without answers to these questions, policymakers can’t ensure a return on investment of public dollars; education and training programs will continue to operate in the dark; employers will continue to struggle to find the right talent; and individuals will continue to make life-changing decisions about pursuing education or training after high school with little clarity on what paths will truly pay off.

The good news is that these blind spots are solvable. The solution lies in enhancing the quarterly wage records that employers are required to submit to state agencies operating Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs. By adding just three data points – occupation, pay rate, and primary work location – learners, policymakers, and employers can gain a much clearer picture of how well education and workforce programs meet learner and employer needs.  

Because states design and operate their own Unemployment Insurance programs, enhancing wage records would be best achieved through coordinated efforts among state agencies,  employers, and federal partners. Based on analysis Strada has performed with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, as of October 2025, 28 states have taken steps to add at least one of these elements in their UI wage reporting. As of October 2025, 13 states collect or are developing collections for either occupation or job title, 14 collect or are developing collections for worksite location, and 17 collect or are developing collections for hours worked or pay rate. This state-by-state variation demonstrates tremendous national momentum that federal action can leverage.

Federal support of the wider adoption of enhanced wage records across the U.S. would represent a foundational step toward a more informed, effective, and efficient higher education and workforce system. One effective way to accelerate state adoption of enhanced wage records is through the codification and expansion of Workforce Data Quality Initiative (WDQI) grants. These grants provide resources that help states modernize their data systems, integrate education and workforce data, and develop tools for analyzing employment outcomes. These resources are critical to the data infrastructure of the workforce system and its ability to create and access essential real-time labor market information. 

WDQI grants have already proven successful in helping states enhance their longitudinal data systems, but many states still lack the resources to adopt enhanced wage records. Codifying and expanding this program would enable more states to adopt enhanced wage records, leading to better employer alignment of workforce programs and postsecondary education with employer talent needs. Ensuring that these funds prioritize education-to-employment data system enhancements would significantly increase the value of those investments. 

Leading business groups have expressed support for enhanced wage records, recognizing their value for strategic education and workforce planning. For states that have embraced electronic UI reporting, the ongoing burden on employers can be quite manageable, as these systems are designed to track essential employment details that employers already maintain. Many employers use Human Resource Information System (HRIS) platforms such as ADP or Workday, which often collect the necessary data elements. With some thoughtful adjustments, these data can be linked to state employment records to automate reporting and streamline or replace other data collection efforts. 

The long-term benefits would be transformational. Enhanced employment data would strengthen the education and workforce ecosystem by providing clearer insights into talent supply and demand and enabling better tracking of education outcomes. With enhanced wage data, employers could identify which programs are producing job-ready candidates for high-demand, high-wage fields, such as health care, technology, and the skilled trades, while educators could respond more effectively to evolving labor market opportunities. Most importantly, learners would have the information they need to make well-informed decisions about postsecondary education and training programs, reinforcing the promise of postsecondary education as America’s most reliable pathway to opportunity for all. 

Thank you for the opportunity to submit comments and for your commitment to creating a transparent and reliable system of higher education. Please feel free to reach out to me directly or to our Federal Relations team for additional information or to discuss these important issues in greater depth. 

Sincerely, 
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Stephen Moret 

President and CEO