My twins start college this fall, and I’ve spent the year stuck on a quieter question than where they’ll live or what they’ll study: how colleges shape the decisions families make, usually without any of us noticing.
Schools design most of those decisions with real care. The housing contract, the meal plan, the payment schedule — they know that how you frame a choice drives the outcome as much as the choice itself.
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But the most consequential decision a family faces gets left to chance: what happens to the money when something goes wrong, and a student has to step away.
The numbers are hard to look away from. One in three students seriously considered stopping out in the past six months. Among those who left carrying loans, 35% now name that debt as the very reason they can’t go back. A single unprotected withdrawal becomes a permanent one — the debt stays, the degree never comes.
It reminds me of Nudge: the framing of a choice often matters more than the options inside it. And yet, when a family hands over tens of thousands of dollars for a semester, the design just goes silent. Only 58% of schools even put their refund policy where the decision is actually made. Just 2% of finance leaders think students understand what they’ll get back.
We call that a disclosure problem. I think it’s an architecture problem.
When no protection is offered at enrollment, “no protection” becomes the default — not because a family chose it, but because no one ever built the choice.
Families with money absorb the loss. Families without it carry it, often for good.
That’s the gap we built GradGuard to close, and more than 700 institutions have closed it with us. More than three-quarters of students who’ve received a paid tuition insurance claim tell us they’ve re-enrolled or plan to once they’re well.
Colleges already accept that design shapes behavior. The harder thing to accept is that this design isn’t just operational. It’s moral.
As I send my own kids off this fall, that’s the part I can’t let go of.
So here’s my advice for college-bound families:
1) Ask your school about its refund policy. If it’s like most, you’ll get a partial tuition refund only through the first five weeks of classes — and virtually no school refunds academic fees or housing.
2) If your school won’t refund tuition, fees, and housing in full, ask them why they don’t offer tuition insurance.
3) Take a look at GradGuard - College Life Protected — yes, the company I co-founded, and one that, fifteen years on, has protected more than 2 million students.
And if you’re a university official: reach out. I’d welcome the chance to show you how GradGuard’s mission helps more than 700 colleges and universities educate and protect students from the risks of college life.
Students and families deserve more than a default they never consciously chose.
Thanks for reading. Subscribe if you are curious to see what I am working on and my observations on modern life and the challenges facing our society.