In July 2012, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) released the Financial Aid Shopping Sheet (now the College Financing Plan) format and asked institutions to voluntarily commit to supplying financial aid information to students in a way that could be better understood and compared.
However, despite the commitment to using the standardized format, we have heard a number of concerns about elements of the template that could be improved to make it more user friendly to institutions and students. We have also reviewed the NASFAA report No Clear Winner: Consumer Testing of Financial Aid Award Letters as well as comments that have been submitted to ShoppingSheet@ed.gov. As a result, we have developed a revised format that includes the following changes:
- We are changing the name of the template from Financial Aid Shopping Sheet to College Financing Plan to more accurately reflect that loans may be a significant part of the student’s investment, and to emphasize to students that they are making a financial transaction when enrolling in an institution.
- We are introducing the College Financing Plan template this year as part of a beta testing protocol. While institutions are not required to use the updated template, we hope that some will use it in their financial aid packaging in order to tell us what improvements could be made before rolling this out in final form next year.
For those institutions which choose to test the new format this year, we ask that you submit any comments or suggestions to shoppingsheet@ed.gov no later than April 1, 2019.