Relates to student financial aid award letters

• Democratic2

◆ The sponsor's argument

Why Andrew Gounardes says this is needed

In the 2016 budget, the New York State legislature made important progress towards transparency in college admissions by creating a uniform financial aid award letter, to be developed by the Department of Financial Services (DFS) and the Higher Education Services Corporation (HESC). The letter, which is described in Section 9-W of the Banking Law, was a key piece of New York's "Student Borrower Bill of Rights," which aimed to help undergraduate students and their families understand and afford the true cost of higher education. Section 9-W describes a series of pieces of information that all finan- cial aid award letters must include, such as: the estimated cost of attendance, broken down by tuition and fees, room and board, books, and transportation; financial aid offered by the federal government, state, and college, and which portions must be repaid; any expected student and/or family contribution; and campus-specific graduation, median borrowing, and loan default rates. Missing from this paragraph in Section 9-W, however, is a key data point that every family needs and yet many colleges fail to clearly include: the "net price" of college, or bottom line that the payer is responsible for after grants but before loans. With more than half of New York students graduating tens of thousands of dollars in debt, simply requiring the listing of net price in award letters could go a long way towards helping families and individuals plan their annual budgets and avoid mountains of crippling debt. While DFS' current design of the uniform financial aid award letter has a section titled "What you will pay," it is not one of the categories of data included in Section 9-W and thus afforded statutory consideration. Additionally, the current DFS template includes a section on loan options, broken down by federal vs. private lenders - and yet this data point is also excluded from Section 9-W. This bill enshrines these two critical information points into statute by officially including them in the standard financial aid award letter which all colleges must use under state Banking Law. Helping students and their families easily understand the cost of higher education so that they can make an informed decision before embarking on what is frequently the most expensive endeavor of their lives is the least we can do to abate our state's burgeoning college affordability crisis.

This is the sponsor's own case for the bill, quoted from their memorandum. It is not Agora's description of what the bill does.