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What If Financial Aid Packages Were as Clear as LEGO Instructions?
- Laura Rudolph
- Feb 11
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 14
Financial aid packages have improved over the years, but let’s be honest—they still leave a lot to be desired. Ask any family comparing multiple aid offers, and they’ll tell you the same thing:
What’s free money and what’s a loan?
What’s optional and what’s required?
What’s the actual cost they’ll pay per year?
These should be simple questions, yet financial aid packages make them unnecessarily complicated.
I recently helped my niece and nephew through the college search process. Without my knowledge of financial aid, I’m not sure how they would have made sense of their offers. In reviewing more than 20 aid packages, every school presented its aid differently. Some lumped scholarships and loans together, while others buried key costs in the fine print.
It wasn’t until I put everything into an Excel sheet with a standardized format that the reality became clear. For example:
One school that claimed an out-of-pocket cost of $0? That included a Parent PLUS Loan, for which they hadn't even applied (nor been offered, as it's based on quality of credit)
One college that looked more expensive on the surface actually had fewer hidden costs and ended up being a better deal.
If professionals struggle to make sense of these offers, what chance do students and families have?
And to make things even harder, colleges don’t even use the same words for the same things.
The Language Problem: Why Comparing Aid Offers Is a Mess
Colleges use wildly different terms for the same types of aid. This makes it nearly impossible for families to compare offers side by side.
For example, scholarships and grants (which don’t have to be repaid) might be called:
Academic Awards
Merit Awards
Merit-Based Aid
Academic Grants
Tuition Remissions
Gift Aid
Tuition Waivers
Need-Based Aid (which can also sometimes include loans and work-study!)
Even something as supposedly standardized as Net Price—the amount a student actually has to pay—gets labeled differently.
Some colleges call it:
Net Cost (which sometimes includes loans, sometimes doesn’t)
Direct Cost
Out-of-Pocket Cost (both of which may or may not include loans and work-study)
The result? Families can’t compare apples to apples. They’re left to decipher unclear, inconsistent and sometimes misleading information while making one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives.
It’s time for higher ed to stop making financial aid a puzzle and start making it clear, transparent and easy to act on. And to do that, we should be looking outside of higher ed for inspiration.
What Higher Ed Can Learn from Companies That Simplify Complex Information
Colleges aren’t the only ones dealing with complicated processes and confused customers.
Look at companies that:
Deeply understand their audience
Take difficult-to-explain steps and make them intuitive
One of the best examples? LEGO.
LEGO’s consumer base ranges from young kids to adult collectors. Their users come from all over the world, speak different languages, and have varying skill levels. Yet, LEGO instructions work for everyone.
Why? Because LEGO applies four key principles when designing instructions:
Early Focus on Users and Tasks – They design with real users in mind, not just what makes sense internally.
Empirical Measurement – They test how people interact with their instructions to remove confusion.
Iterative Design – They refine over time based on user feedback.
Visual Clarity and Consistency – They use icons, color-coding and clear steps instead of jargon. In fact, you'll find very little text on LEGO instructions.
Higher ed should be taking a similar approach with financial aid.
Applying LEGO’s Four Key Principles to Financial Aid Packages
1. Early Focus on Users and Tasks
Who is actually reading financial aid award letters? It’s not just parents. It’s students making one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives—many of them first-generation, low-income, or unfamiliar with financial terms.
Yet, most schools still design aid packages as if every recipient understands:
The difference between subsidized and unsubsidized loans
That Parent PLUS Loans aren’t “free” money
Why a work-study award isn’t automatically available cash
How to fix it:
Survey families and observe students interacting with award letters.
Simplify financial aid terms (and no, a tiny glossary in the fine print isn’t enough).
Highlight key questions students should ask instead of assuming they already know what to look for.
(Lego)
2. Empirical Measurement: Testing to Eliminate Confusion
LEGO doesn’t just assume their instructions work—they watch users build, track where they get stuck, and adjust accordingly. (UXMatters)
Colleges? We send out financial aid offers and hope for the best.
How to fix it:
Test different financial aid award formats with real students. Do they immediately know what’s a grant vs. a loan?
Track questions that come into the financial aid office and redesign materials to answer them upfront.
Run a readability check on aid letters. If it’s written at a 12th-grade reading level but your audience includes first-gen students who may not be familiar with financial terms, it’s not as clear as you think. (P.S. Did you know journalists are trained to write on a 4th grade reading level for the general public? I did, because I was one!)
3. Iterative Design: Keep Improving Over Time
LEGO constantly refines its instructions. If builders struggle with a step, they adjust future manuals to make it easier.
Higher ed, on the other hand, rarely updates financial aid communications. Once a template is in place, it sticks around for years—regardless of whether families find it useful.
How to fix it:
Revisit financial aid award letters annually. Have your counseling team take notes of phone calls and emails—what do students misunderstand most?
Test different layouts and visuals. Does a table work better than a paragraph? Do icons help?
Use digital tools to track engagement. If students are ignoring certain sections, it’s a sign that part of your letter isn’t working.
(Medium)
4. Visual Clarity and Consistency: Use Design to Improve Understanding
LEGO relies on icons, step-by-step visuals and color coding to make their instructions instantly clear.
Meanwhile, financial aid letters often look like this:
"The following estimated awards are based on the FAFSA and are contingent upon full-time enrollment. Subsidized and Unsubsidized Direct Loan eligibility is determined by demonstrated financial need..."
That’s a paragraph most students will skim or ignore.
How to fix it:
Color-coding aid types (grants in green, loans in red, work-study in yellow).
💡 Why this works:
🟩 Green = Free Money (Grants & Scholarships)
🟨 Yellow = Optional (Work-Study & Parent Loans—families decide if they want to accept them)
🟥 Red = Loans (Must be repaid)
Using consistent terminology across all materials.
Providing a simple "Bottom Line" section that clearly shows what the student actually has to pay.
If a financial aid package isn’t immediately clear within 10 seconds of looking at it, it needs a redesign.
(Medium)
Final Thoughts
LEGO has mastered the art of making complex processes easy to understand. It’s time to apply their same user-centered design principles to financial aid.
Because when students can clearly see their costs and next steps, they’re more likely to make informed, confident decisions about where to enroll.
And isn’t that the goal?
