St. Lawrence University received a five-year Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create the multidisciplinary Liberal Arts Science Scholars program (award #1458712), which makes a high quality science and mathematics education accessible to high achieving,…

In this brief, the authors review some of the main goals of state student financial aid programs and provide a few examples of how these programs are organized. They also describe how state programs vary in terms of who benefits. They then discuss various possible designs for joint federal-state policymaking in this area and study their impact.…

In this paper, we leverage detailed, individual-level student data to understand the relationships between family finances, merit-based aid, and first-year student retention. With three cohorts of student data that comprise family financial status, institutional merit scholarships, and many of the other known correlates of student retention, we…

We examine the impacts of being awarded a Cal Grant, among the most generous state merit aid programs. We exploit variation in eligibility rules using GPA and family income cutoffs that are ex ante unknown to applicants. Cal Grant eligibility increases degree completion by 2 to 5 percentage points in our reduced form estimates. Cal Grant also…

The admissions process used today in America's most selective colleges and universities is a classic case of interest group politics gone awry. Nobody champions or fights for smart, low-income students. The result is an admissions process reduced to a series of "preferences." Taken together with other widely-used admissions practices,…

For 50 years, the Higher Education Act has been the primary vehicle for advancing federal higher education policy. Many policymakers and interested observers expect its upcoming reauthorization to address three overarching topic areas: college affordability, institutional quality, and student safety. Indeed, previous reauthorizations have…

Twenty-one US states currently offer some form of merit-based postsecondary financial aid, although the generosity and eligibility requirements of merit aid programs varies from state to state. This article uses nationally representative data from high school students in the early 1990s and the early 2000s to evaluate the relationship between the…

This report provides data regarding state-funded expenditures for student financial aid and illustrates the extent of efforts made by the states to assist postsecondary students. Information in this report is based on academic year 2014-15 data from the 46th Annual National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs (NASSGAP) survey. Data…

While the literature on postsecondary student success identifies important academic and social factors associated with student outcomes, one question that persists concerns the influence of financial aid. We use the National Student Clearinghouse's StudentTracker service to develop a more complete model of student success that accommodates…

President Obama has proposed a financial aid policy whereby students who complete 100 hours of community service would receive a tax credit of US$4,000 for college. After lawmakers cut this proposal from previous legislation, the administration was tasked with studying the feasibility of implementation. However, the implications of the policy for…

In this dissertation, I offer two independent studies that each contribute to the literature on the college choices. The first paper examines the impact of Arizona's merit based scholarship on college enrollment decisions. I find that both enrollment and tuition and fees increased at Arizona's three large public institutions after the…

The concentration of broad-based merit aid adoption in the southeastern United States has been well noted in the literature. However, there are states that have adopted broad-based merit aid programs outside of the Southeast. Guided by multiple theoretical frameworks, including innovation diffusion theory (e.g., Gray, 1973, 1994; Rogers, 2003),…

The cost of attending college has risen steadily over the past 30 years, making financial aid an important determinant of college choice for many students and a subject of concern for colleges and state governments. In this paper, we estimate the effect of rule-based merit aid assignment on students' enrollment decisions at the University of Iowa.…

The intention of the program is that conditioning additional financial aid on certain behaviors will lead students to increase their effort towards their studies, which in turn will lead them to perform better in their classes in the short-term and progress through their degree requirements at a quicker rate in the medium-term. The program is…

This report provides data regarding state-funded expenditures for student financial aid and illustrates the extent of efforts made by the states to assist postsecondary students. Information in this report is based on academic year 2013-14 data from the 45th Annual NASSGAP survey. Data highlights include: (1) In the 2013-14 academic year, the…