Five articles are presented concerning student aid planning and educational policy, based on experiences gained in regional workshops conducted by the National Institute of Independent Colleges and Universities (NIICU). The purpose of the workshops was to translate the data gathered in the NIICU Student Aid Recipient Survey into formats useful for institutional planning. Participants in the workshops could compare their respective college's profile to institutions regionally and nationally and by type of institution. Virginia Ann Hodgkinson in "Student Aid: Its Distribution and Its Impact on College Operating Budgets" examines the national trends in student aid programming and national projections and describes the impact of these projections on individual institutions. In"Institutional Policies for Student Financial Aid," Nathan Dickmeyer enumerates a series of institutional policies that need to be examined in order to develop a coherent student aid policy. In "How One College Changed Its Policies: A Case Study," Christopher Toppe describes how a college, caught short by fund reductions caused by changes in the federal campus allotment formula, changed its policies using the NIICU self-study and managed to maintain its enrollment. In "A Financial Aid Planning Worksheet," Madeline Green, Christopher Toppe, and Robert Atwell set out a strategy and worksheet that currently are being developed into an interactive planning model by NIICU. Finally, Virginia Ann Hodgkinson in "Some Ways to Stretch Scarce Financial Aid Resources" summarizes activities developed by independent colleges to cope with an unstable present and uncertain future in federal student aid funding. (SW)