Aid Offer Decoder

It is 9:18pm and two college aid letters are open on your desk. One school looks generous until you notice half the “aid” is loans, and the other buries the real bill under fees, estimates, and work-study. Your claw keeps comparing totals, but the total is the trap.

Install Aid Offer Decoder and tell your claw, “Compare these aid offers by what we will actually pay.” It separates grants and scholarships from debt, flags work-study as wages, lines up billed costs against indirect costs, and shows the uncovered balance school by school.

Unlike just asking your claw to compare award letters, this skill stops padded aid totals from beating cleaner offers with less repayable money.

What you get:

• SKILL.md — teaches your claw aid-letter comparison
• AID_OFFER_FIELDS.md — names every cost and aid field
• OFFER_COMPARISON_TEMPLATE.csv — lines schools up side by side
• FAMILY_DECISION_BRIEF.md — turns numbers into family-readable plain English
• FINANCIAL_AID_QUESTIONS.md — gives you exact questions for the aid office
• EXAMPLES.md — shows clean before-and-after comparisons
• MANIFEST.json — tells OpenClaw what this skill is
• VALIDATION.md — checks the decoder does the job

Drop it in your OpenClaw. No setup. Works in seconds.