If nothing else, the last four years have clearly demonstrated that government regulatory requirements add burdens that cost time and money.

In The Cornell Review, senior Lucia Rafanelli warns that students applying for financial aid may be wrapped in even more red tape if Congress passes a “financial aid transparency” bill.

Students who have successfully navigated the college application process (which, speaking from experience, is no simple task), who have waded through the even more complicated financial aid application paperwork, and who have actually been accepted to a college — surely must be able to read.

They must know the difference between a grant and a loan. They must understand that loans need to be paid back. And they should be able to do the simple math needed to figure out their minimum monthly payment on a loan of a given amount. At the very least, they should be able to make a phone call or write an email to a college’s financial aid office to ask about a payment schedule.

All this, though, is not enough for advocates of “financial aid transparency” law. A recently proposed bill, discussed in Gail Collins’ New York Times column “The Lows of Higher Ed,” would require all colleges and universities to send all student loan awardees the same form explaining the terms of their loans, including an explicit statement of their future monthly payments.

This coincides with the Department of Education’s release of its financial aid “Shopping Sheet,” a form it recommends all colleges use to present aid offers to admitted students. A version of the Sheet showcased in an Inside Higher Ed article from last month even includes statistics about the hypothetical school’s graduation rate, and the student loan default rate. While use of the Shopping Sheet is not (yet) required, Collins notes that the Obama Administration has already begun using its clout to attempt to convince colleges to make use of the form part of their standard operating procedure.

Perhaps this seems like a relatively harmless initiative (and, compared to some of the other initiatives coming out of Washington lately, perhaps it is), but ultimately, the adoption of the bill presently being considered in Congress would constitute yet another unnecessary regulation that would consume scarce government resources and undermine the personal responsibility of students and their families in being conscious of their own financial decisions.

It is not the job of the government—or anyone—to insure that people have every bit of information that might be relevant to one of their personal decisions set out in front of them in good-looking tables and charts. Students and their families should make informed decisions about their education and its cost, and they should have access to the requisite information to do so. But, if this information matters as much to them as it should, then they should also make the effort to seek it out for themselves if it is not obvious from whatever financial aid information is given to them by their chosen college.

Seriously, we’re not talking about rocket science here. We’re talking about actually reading the awards letters, paying attention to what is a grant and what is a loan, and calling up a school’s registrar if that isn’t clear. We’re talking about reading financial documents before signing them. We’re talking about a minimal amount of effort—certainly much less than any student will need to put in to do well at a university, let alone to make it in the job market later on in life.

Colleges should not deceive students about financial aid, nor should they withhold information about the conditions attached to loans or other aid: That would be fraud, and would show a lack of good faith. Laws against those things, however, already exist and there is no need for a new law standardizing the way in which universities present financial aid information. If students really do hope to be successful enough to make enough money to be able to pay off their loans, they had best be capable of doing the little bit of work it might require to find out how much their education will cost them in the first place.