Does extra financial aid for the summer lead to gains in completion and earnings? Despite being the largest source of financial aid to low-income college students, the traditional Pell Grant has had one major limitation: if students enroll in two semesters full-time, they will not have any tuition support for the summer term of the same academic…

One of the original purposes of student financial aid was to ensure fairer access to post-secondary education to those least able to afford it and to those traditionally underrepresented. Various federal and state programs were put in place to achieve this goal, including the federal Pell Grant and state aid programs. Yet policymakers and…

The 2015 Federal Student Aid Supplement (FSA Supplement), directed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) at the U.S. Department of Education (ED), is a collection of federal student loan data intended to augment the 1996/01 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:96/01) and the 2004/09 Beginning Postsecondary…

For the institution and its regional campuses under review, the amount of outstanding student liabilities (i.e., monies owed by the student to the institution for educational-related expenditures not satisfied by the end of the term) grew at an alarming rate between 2000 and 2014, with some of the institution's regional campuses experiencing over…

Students and their families evaluate net price when determining whether they can afford a college. But what affects net price? There are factors, such as instructional inefficiencies, administrative expenses, federal financial aid, and state appropriations, that have been noted in the literature that have an impact on costs and tuition. This study…

Several wealthy colleges and universities have recently begun removing all loans from low-income students' financial aid packages. This article reports on a study that found that the introduction of "no-loan" policies has positively impacted low-income enrollments, suggesting that this aid strategy may be an effective, though limited,…

For more than a decade, college prices have been rising consistently and have continued to rise at a gradual pace after the Stafford loan limit increases were enacted in 2008 and 2009. However, it is difficult to determine if a direct relationship exists between increases in college prices and the Stafford loan limit increases because of the…

The Federal Pell Grant End-of-Year Report presents primary aspects of Federal Pell Grant Program activity for the 2011-2012 award year. This presentation is a compilation of quantitative program data assembled to offer insights into the changes to the Title IV applicant universe and the Federal Pell Grant Program. The Federal Pell Grant…

This Statistics in Brief examines three cohorts of recent college graduates 1 year after they attained their bachelor's degree. The graduation years for the three cohorts span a 15-year period: 1992-93, 1999-2000, and 2007-08. The latest cohort (2007-08) graduated in the midst of the 2008 recession. This Statistics in Brief first examines how…

This study explored relationships between placement decisions in English and reading courses and measures of college achievement and persistence for first-time degree- and certificate-seeking community college students enrolled at a large, public, suburban-serving community college in Maryland. Archived records were examined for students who had…

In 2006-07, the federal government awarded over $13 billion in Pell Grants to more than 5 million undergraduate students (U.S. Department of Education 2007). The goal of the Pell Grant program is to help students with financial need enroll in and graduate from college by providing them with a basic foundation of financial aid, to which they may…

This report examines the changes that occurred in college student financial aid between 1986-87 and 1989-90 by comparing students receiving various forms of aid in the fall of 1986 with those receiving aid in the fall of 1989. The data used were derived from the 1987 and 1990 National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies (NPSAS). The overall focus of…

An evaluation of existing and proposed mechanisms to ensure data accuracy for the Pell Grant program is reported, and recommendations for efficient detection of fraud and error in the program are offered. One study objective was to examine the existing system of pre-established criteria (PEC), which are validation criteria that select students on…

Comparison of federal need-analysis formulas for student financial aid in 1992-93 and 1993-94 focused on elimination of home/farm equity from calculations, parent contributions, and Pell Grant awards. Results suggest higher unmet need and lower Pell Grant awards, and imply that the most needy students may lose gift assistance to more affluent…

The issues, options, and procedures for annually measuring overall payment error in the Pell Grant program are specified in detail. Guidelines for establishing a definition of Pell Grant payment error are provided, and the design issues related to error measurement are examined. A comparison is made of options for selecting a study sample and for…