Financial Aid Forms and Policies

This guidance is specific to the 2023-24 award year and later.

Yes, effective with the 2023-24 award year, changes to the Higher Education Act of 1965 {HEA), as amended, require that schools provide a list of the cost of attendance {COA) components "on any portion of the website describing tuition and fees of the institution."

In Dear Colleague Letter GEN-22-15, the U.S. Department of Education {ED) provided additional guidance in question COA-QS:

"Under the [FAFSA Simplification] Act, institutions must make publicly available on their website a list of all the elements of COA and disclose such elements on any portion of their website describing tuition and fees. Can the Department give further guidance on where and how institutions can meet this requirement?

As noted, institutions must make publicly available on their website a list of their COA elements and on any webpage discussing tuition and fees. Under the HEA, institutions otherwise have flexibility in determining specifically how and where to best provide the information. Institutions should be able to demonstrate to the Department a reasonable approach to providing the required information in all the appropriate places."

So, what does all this mean, really? It is NASFM's understanding that this means:

1. The point of the statutory requirement is to ensure transparency and clarity when it comes to how much it will cost beyond just tuition and fees. Listing only tuition and fees misrepresents how much  college costs.
2. Whenever tuition and fee dollar amounts are listed for an academic program on the school's website, ALL of the remaining cost component dollar figures for that program also must be listed on that same webpage. You cannot list tuition and fee figures on one page and then link out to another webpage that lists the other cost component figures (because they would not then be on the same webpage}.
3. lf you simply have the words "tuition and fees" in the narrative on a webpage (without providing figures), and then provide a link to where the tuition and fee figures are provided along with the other cost components and figures, this would meet the requirement. In other words, when any portion of the school's website has a narrative about tuition and fees, it could then direct or link students to a single web page that shows all of the cost components and figures for that program.
4. The school is not required to list all cost components/figures for all academic programs on a single webpage, but it could.
5. When there are programs with different COA components, you should be detailing those differences specifically, not referencing a general COA breakdown.

One final note: There is no single, one-size-fits-all way of handling this. Whenever ED uses language indicating the school has "flexibility," the school should exercise that flexibility and be careful that asking for further definition might then restrict other schools wishing to take advantage of that flexibility.