Students and families all over the country are saving, working, taking out loans, and taking steps to make college affordable. Yet they still find themselves facing an unreasonably high price for college, with unexpected, and sometimes untenable, expenses, and fall short of the resources they need to successfully complete degrees. Financial challenges are a consistent predictor of noncompletion in higher education, and they are becoming more severe over time. There are clear steps that can be taken by institutions and financial aid policymakers to align students' budgets with the actual price of college they are likely to face over the course of their college career. Doing so would not only help students succeed, but it would help institutions retain students and target aid more effectively, it would help inform current debates about financial aid reform, and it would improve the efficiency of the overall higher education financing system. [For Part 1, "The Real Value of What Students Do in College," see ED623204. For Part 3, "Promoting Inclusion and Identity Safety to Support College Success," see ED623205. For Part 4, "Why Performance-Based College Funding Doesn't Work," see ED623208. For Part 5, "When College Students Start Behind," see ED623207.]