Recent years have seen major changes in the structure of student financial aid in the United States. The use of financial need as the basis for awarding aid has been eroding, with states, colleges and universities, and the federal government implementing new programs that rely less on need, or on expanded definitions of financial need, as the key eligibility criterion. There has been little scholarly research and policy analysis conducted to date to investigate and document the impact of these changes on college access and choice in our country, from both a national and an institutional perspective.
This study uses data from the NPSAS surveys to examine the use of need-based versus non-need institutional financial aid in colleges and universities since the late 1980s. Descriptive and time-series analyses were used to examine differences in the use of these types of aid among varying institutional types, and to examine how the use of these types of aid has changed for students from different income backgrounds.
The specific research questions to be addressed in this study include:
- Over the last decade, how has the volume of need-based versus non-need institutional financial aid changed in different types of institutions (level, control, Carnegie classification, financial characteristics, student body characteristics)?
- What have been the changes in the awarding of need and non-need financial aid to students from different income backgrounds?
- How have changes in the distribution of aid between need-based and non-need affected access and choice by students with different characteristics?
This research was supported by grants from the Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Michigan (#3636), and the Association for Institutional Research, Improving Institutional Research in Postsecondary Educational Institutions grant program (#98-104).
© Donald E. Heller and Thomas F. Nelson Laird, 1999