Families need clarity on financing college.

Financing a house or a car can be confusing. But it's nothing compared with trying to finance a college education.

In college-loan documents, disclosures about rates and terms are often paltry. That's especially rough for the 17-year-olds who are poring over the paperwork with their parents and committing to years of payments.

Teenagers are among the least equipped to comprehend the implications of high debt. High school seniors recently surveyed about their understanding of financial basics by the JumpStart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy scored, on average, just over 50 percent.

And yet, full-time students who borrow to pay for four years of college graduate with an average debt of almost $20,000. That's a result of skyrocketing college costs.

Students and parents should have access to understandable information at critical points in the financing process. The current system makes that nearly impossible. Colleges calculate the cost of attending in different ways, so comparisons are difficult. Financial aid award letters don't always make clear the difference between grants, which don't need to be repaid, and loans, which do. They also give little or no guidance on how to minimize loans, secure low-cost financing, or figure out the bottom-line cost of loans.

Lenders offering private loans contribute to the problem by failing to adequately disclose terms and rates, making it hard for families to comparison shop. Parents often don't get that information until they sign for the loan. And lenders aren't required to tell students about how high payments on a variable interest rate loan can balloon if their interest rate rises.

Research by Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, has found that students and their parents turn most often to a college's financial aid office for the ins and outs of paying for an education. But the information they get is often inconsistent and at times misleading. For example, some expensive colleges give enticingly large financial aid awards but hide the amount families must pay.