Understanding How Students Pay for College: Three Essays on Financial Aid Policy in the United States.

higher education;financial aid;public policy;Education;Social Sciences;Higher Education

Wiederspan, Mark J.Scott-Clayton, Judith ;

University of Michigan

关键词: higher education;    financial aid;    public policy;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Higher Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/113533/mwieders_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation examines three different aspects of financial aid policy in the United States. In the first essay, I examine the evolution of federal student loan policies from 1992 to 2014. Over time, the federal government’s support for higher education has evolved financial aid from being grant-based to a student loan centric system. In the early 1970’s, student loans accounted for less than half of federal expenditures. Today, student loans represent almost two-thirds. In this chapter, I trace the history of federal student loan policies from the last two decades and highlight the political and economic issues that motivated those policy changes, and how the legacy of those changes shape current financial aid policy. In the second essay, I investigate the student-level impacts associated with the decision of community colleges to opt out of the Stafford loan program. Using administrative data, I estimate the within college differences in student outcomes before and after an institution opts out of the federal loan program. I find that students enrolling when the community college offered federal loans are 7.6 percentage points more likely to borrow than students who enrolled when the institutions opted out. Overall borrowing also increases by $386 a year. I also find evidence that students borrowing a loan attempted 19 additional credits in their first year of enrollment and were more likely to attempt and complete math and science courses than non-borrowers. In the final essay, Susan Dynarski and I provide a five-year retrospective of what has changed in the aid application process, what has not, and the possibilities for reform. Using data from the nationally representative 2007-08 National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey (NPSAS), we examine how the distribution of aid would change if applicants could older tax information. For example, a student applying in early 2012 for aid for 2012-13 could use IRS data from tax year 2010, rather than 2011. We find that using ;;prior-prior” tax information has little effect on aid eligibility, with 65 percent of applicants seeing zero change in their Pell eligibility and 75 percent seeing a change of less than $500.