This Data Point uses data from the 2016/17 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B:16/17). The study is a national survey of students who earned a bachelor's degree during the 2015-16 academic year. Students are surveyed at different time points to study change. The second collection was done in 2017, about 1 year after respondents…

House Democrats yesterday introduced major legislation to reauthorize the landmark Higher Education Act. Although reauthorization is long overdue, the new legislation, called the College Affordability Act, proposes mainly marginal improvements to a broken higher education financing system. Moreover, it doesn't do enough to help people who don't go…

These Web Tables present information on the employment and enrollment status of first-time bachelor's degree recipients one year after graduation. The analysis uses data collected in the first follow-up surveys of three administrations of the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B). The first follow-up studies, conducted in 1994,…

Financial aid makes up the bulk of federal higher education spending, but do those dollars make a difference to needy students? A look at Federal Work-Study and Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant allocations show that a disproportionate amount of funding goes to private universities with high tuition and low Federal Pell Grant…

The federal government's role in supporting higher education touches nearly every aspect of the work performed by American colleges and universities. Federal authorities control an immense amount of public resources that are used to strategically exert influence across a complex and differentiated postsecondary system. This report is intended to…

Access to college has increased substantially over the last 50 years, but student success--defined as the combination of academic success and degree or certificate completion--has not kept pace. Student success, moreover, generally correlates with students' financial resources: Students from high-income families attend and complete college at…

Data on student aid for 2015-16 confirm that the dramatic increases in aid awarded in 2009-10 and 2010-11 were products of extreme economic circumstances, not harbingers of long-run changes in financing for postsecondary education. Both total federal education loans and federal loans per full-time equivalent (FTE) student declined for the fifth…

The federal government plays an indispensable role in helping community college students pay for their education. It is hard to imagine today's community college campuses without needs-based federal student aid, such as the Pell Grant program and subsidized loans. There are, however, significant differences between community college students and…

As the nation slowly emerges from the Great Recession, the patterns of student aid are returning to the paths they were on before the economy crashed. The federal government, which dramatically stepped up its subsidies to students in 2009-10 and 2010-11, continues to play an expanded role, but not a growing role. Students continue to borrow at…

Undergraduate education is a highly profitable business for nonprofit colleges and universities. They do not show profits on their books, but instead take their profits in the form of spending on some combination of research, graduate education, low-demand majors, low faculty teaching loads, excess compensation, and featherbedding. The industry's…

After increasing by 18% (in inflation-adjusted dollars) between 2007-08 and 2010-11, the total amount students borrowed in federal and non-federal education loans declined by 13% between 2010-11 and 2013-14. Growth in full-time equivalent (FTE) postsecondary enrollment of 16% over the first three years, followed by a decline of 4% over the next…

Trends in Student Aid, an annual College Board publication since 1983, is a compendium of detailed, up-to-date information on the funding that is available to help students pay for college. This report documents grant aid from federal and state governments, colleges and universities, employers, and other private sources, as well as loans, tax…

As college costs have soared and the U.S. economy struggles to move out of the recession, more and more Americans have relied on federal student financial assistance programs to help them meet their postsecondary expenses. Data from the Federal Student Aid (FSA), an office of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), show that the number of students…

Since 1964, the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program has provided funds to subsidize the wages of student employees, but it has never been studied directly. I use an instrumental variables difference-in-difference framework with administrative data from West Virginia to identify causal effects, comparing eligible and ineligible students across…

This paper presents a WWC (What Works Clearinghouse) Quick Review of the report "The Role of Simplification and Information in College Decisions: Results from the H&R Block FAFSA Experiment". The study examined whether assistance in filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) increases the likelihood of filing…