Financial Friction Is Still the Barrier We’re Not Fixing
Strada Education Foundation released its Student-Centered Enrollment Management Principles, a timely and necessary framework for a system that too often asks students to navigate complexity without clarity.
At their core, these principles emphasize something students and families have been saying for years: they need transparency, predictability, and trust in the college decision-making process.
And yet, the current reality tells a very different story.
This year, I experienced the process not as a policy professional or a financial aid professional, but as a parent. My high school senior applied to nearly 20 institutions. Of those, only one provided a complete financial aid offer before decision day. Many institutions are still reviewing scholarship applications while simultaneously pressuring students to commit.
That disconnect isn’t just frustrating, it’s inequitable.
When students are asked to make one of the most significant financial decisions of their lives without full information, we are not just creating confusion, we are reinforcing what I’ve long described as financial friction: the unnecessary complexity that stands between students and their ability to enroll, persist, and complete. After watching my own student navigate this process, that insight feels more relevant than ever.
In the book, Student Financial Success: A Surprising Path to Fix the College Completion Crisis, my co-authors and I argued that the system itself, not students or institutions, are often the root cause of these breakdowns. And we offered three simple principles to guide a better path forward:
- Chart a personal path
- Unlock every dollar
- Cut through complexity
What I saw this year reinforced just how far we still have to go.
Students can’t unlock every dollar when aid packages are incomplete or delayed. They can’t effectively chart a personal path without clear, comparable financial information. And instead of helping them cut through complexity, too many of our current processes add to it.
Strada’s principles make clear that incremental change is no longer enough. Achieving real results will require institutions to rethink long-standing practices:
- From opacity to transparency in pricing and aid
- From institutional timelines to student-centered timelines
- From fragmented processes to coordinated, student-first systems
This is not just about improving enrollment outcomes. It’s about addressing the root cause of why students stop out in the first place. As we highlighted in Student Financial Success, financial barriers not academic ones are often the primary driver of attrition.
If we are serious about access, equity, and restoring trust in higher education, then aligning to student-centered principles isn’t optional; it’s foundational. Because a student-centered system doesn’t just recruit students. It ensures they can afford to say yes, with clarity, confidence, and a real path to completion.
The question isn’t whether we agree with these principles. It’s whether we are willing to change enough to achieve them. So I’ll ask my colleagues across higher ed: If students can’t see a full, clear financial picture before they’re asked to commit, are we truly student-centered?
Transcript
Wes (00:00.172) Amy, if a president asked you what’s the single most student-centered change that we can make right now to reduce the financial aid friction, if you were using the Strada principles as the guide, what would you tell them to do in the next 90 days and why?
Amy Glynn (00:20.446) Yeah, so I think if a president asked me that question, I’d say the most student-centered move you can make in the next 90 days is to try and eliminate uncertainty around how much students will actually pay for college at the point that they need to make that enrollment decision. So only a third of students and families reported a straightforward financial aid experience in Stratus assessment. And so we need to evaluate how financial aid is delivered so students aren’t piecing together
cost of attendance, financial aid eligibility, scholarships, net price, financing options across multiple systems, right? That’s a lot of data to try and pull together from a lot of different places. So instead, they should be experiencing a clear integrated funding plan where the math is done for them. They’re using standard terminology and the student can just see what college is gonna cost, but how it will be covered and the options that exist to address any remaining gaps.
One practical step I’d urge every president to take is walk through their own financial aid notification process as a student would. Because if it’s not clear to our leadership in higher education, it’s almost certainly not gonna be clear to students. But when I say that, Wes, I wanna be really clear, financial aid professionals are not the barrier here, right? Like they are so underwater with everything that’s going on. They’re operating in outdated systems, limited staffing.
Wes (01:33.292) Yeah, absolutely.
Amy Glynn (01:48.872) We don’t even need to get into the increased compliance complexity right now and they’re still trying to serve students. So this change is not intent, it’s scaffolding. Institutions need the time, the staff, the integrated systems that allow financial aid enrollment teams to deliver that timely, complete and student-ready information. And we know this matters because financial barriers drive the vast number of stopouts.
Wes (01:54.193) right.
Amy Glynn (02:19.382) Nearly 87 % of students who leave school do so for one of two or three financial reasons. And we know that we have 42 million students with some college no degree. So that’s, I’m not gonna do the math, can’t do the math, but like that’s a lot of students that are being impacted by the financial friction. So put really simply, the way that we begin to solve the completion crisis is by reducing financial friction through a personalized funding path.
that helps every student unlock every dollar possible so that they can move forward with clarity and not guesswork around how they’re gonna pay for school.
Wes (02:56.43) Amy, I love your emphasis on transparency and providing clear communication to the student. think if presidents follow that North Star, can’t go wrong.
Amy Glynn (03:09.354) Thanks, I agree.
Wes (03:12.002) Thanks, Amy.