Congress Tackles College Cost Transparency

After passing a sweeping higher ed overhaul in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress now has its sights set on reforming college cost transparency. In a hearing Thursday, members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions questioned experts on how to make college pricing—and how costs compare to student outcomes—more understandable to families.

“You don’t buy a car without comparing prices, quality and finance options. The same is true for buying a home. Why can we not do this for higher ed?” asked Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the committee and recently issued a request for information about the cost of higher education.

The hearing follows a House hearing in September on the same topic—and including one repeat witness, Justin Draeger, senior vice president of affordability for Strada Education Foundation.

Cost transparency has long been a pain point for both students and institutions, who have attempted to clarify viamarketing campaigns, improved price calculator tools and tuition resets that their costs of attendance are often lower than their sticker price would indicate. Students, meanwhile, struggle to find reliable information about the costs of their prospective institutions, leaving them without the financial information they need to decide what institution to attend.

Now, Congressional Republicans are taking notice—and are tying efforts to improve affordability and cost transparency in with their existing focus on the return on investment for students and taxpayers.

At Thursday’s hearing, lawmakers and witnesses alike stressed how little information is available to students about the price of college, with research showing that most students overestimate the price of a public college education. Witnesses also brought up parents’ and families’ confusion about aid offer letters, which the Government Accountability Office has found often understate or fail to include the net price students will actually be paying.

Cassidy stressed the need for transparency as it relates to outcomes and return on investment. Students should be able to compare graduation rates and projected incomes of earning a degree at two different institutions, he said, to give families an accurate picture of what they’re paying for when they pay tuition.

The two Democratic witnesses, meanwhile, argued that college cost transparency is ineffective without also focusing on college affordability—something that is being worsened not only by increasing tuition costs but also by the larger cost-of-living crisis. Nontuition costs, said Mark Huelsman, Director of Policy and Advocacy at The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs, make up the bulk of the cost of attendance. He added that if student aren’t able to afford food or housing, that can severely impact their ability to succeed in college.

“I urge this committee not just to find ways to increase clarity, but to do everything in its power to lower the price that students pay,” he said.

Bipartisan Solutions?

Legislators pointed toward several potential legislative solutions that they said had support on both sides of the aisle. That list included Cassidy’s College Transparency Act, a bill that would provide more detailed information on costs, academic outcomes and career outcomes of specific programs and majors. Cassidy has championed the bill for years, alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren, CTA’s other lead author, but Rep. Virginia Foxx opposed the measure when she led the House education committee. Foxx, who ultimately proposed her own effort to track students’ outcomes, resisted CTA due to privacy concerns. Cassidy noted during the hearing that the bill includes strict data security standards.

Meanwhile, Sen. Jon Husted, an Ohio Republican, also touted his bill with fellow Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama—the Debt, Earnings, and Cost Information Disclosure for Education Act—which would make changes to the Department of Education’s College Scorecard. It would require the resource to include information on average loan amounts in a given academic program, as well as default rates, how long it takes graduates to pay off their loans and how that debt compares to their earnings.

That information would help prospective students “know exactly what they’re getting themselves into before they make a decision to make a huge, huge investment,” Husted said.

Witnesses enumerated their own cost transparency wish lists.

Draeger said, among other things, that the federal government should regulate financial aid offers to use straightforward and standardized language. Huelsman, on the other hand, argued that the “simplest way, and the most powerful way” to make college costs transparent is to make college tuition- or debt-free. He also said that the Trump administration appears to be working against, not toward, cost transparency in higher ed.

“Many of the bipartisan reforms being discussed today require staffing capacity at the Department of Education that frankly, at this moment, do not exist, including at the Institute for Education Sciences,” he said. “Meanwhile, the Trump administration has worked to dismantle the CFPB, which provides oversight and essential information to borrowers, and conducts essential research on the student loan market. Sadly, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act takes us in the wrong direction on both affordability and transparency.”