Americans believe in the value of a college education, but worry about its price. Recent surveys show large majorities affirming the importance of postsecondary education, but characterizing it as too expensive and sometimes financially out of reach. This Statistics in Brief describes three measures of the price of undergraduate education in the…

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 Postsecondary Education Descriptive Analysis Report uses data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies (NPSAS:96, NPSAS:2000 and NPSAS:04) to examine trends in Stafford loan borrowing among undergraduates. NPSAS consists of nationally representative survey data that focus on student financial aid and the enrollment and background…

This report, based on data from the 2003-04 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NASAS:04), provides detailed information about undergraduate tuition and total price of attendance at various types of institutions, the percentage of students receiving various types of financial aid, and the average amounts that they received. In 2003-04,…

The Pell grant program is the largest federal need-based grant program available to postsecondary education students. This report provides a description of Pell Grant recipients who were first-time beginning postsecondary students in the 1995-1996 academic year. Using data from the 1996 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study First…

This report provides a profile of undergraduates who were considered financially independent for the purpose of analyzing their financial aid need during the 1999-2000 academic year. The primary data source for this report was the 1999-2000 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:2000). As a nationally representative sample of…

The major driving forces of change in undergraduate student financing during the 1990s were tuition increases and the broader availability of federal student loans. This report uses data from four National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies (NPSAS) to look at changes in financial aid to students in four types of institutions: public 2-year; public…

Using data from the 1993-1993 and 1999-2000 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:93 and NPSAS:2000), this study examined the most recent trends in net price of college. Changes in net price were analyzed for higher education as a whole and within each type of institution for students with various levels of income and financial need.…

This E.D. TAB is the second publication based on the 2003-04 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:04) conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the U.S. Department of Education. NPSAS is a comprehensive survey that examines how students and their families pay for postsecondary education. The first E.D. TAB…