Financial Need and Aid Volatility among Students with Zero Expected Family Contribution

Students with a zero expected family contribution (EFC) are those with the greatest financial need and least ability to pay for college and now make up more than one in three American undergraduate students. Yet little is known about the year-to-year financial aid volatility of these students, or whether it varies by how the zero EFC was determined. I use nationally-representative data to examine trends in zero EFC receipt over time and then use student-level data from nine colleges and universities to examine zero EFC stability over multiple years by zero EFC status. The results indicate overall stability in zero EFC receipt across multiple years, as about eight in ten students with a zero EFC keeping that status one year later. However, this masks a great deal of heterogeneity among zero EFC recipients by dependency and FAFSA filing statuses. These differences have significant policy implications for allocating scarce financial aid dollars

The Distributional and Cost Implications of Negative Expected Family Contributions

Eligibility for many federal, state, and institutional financial aid programs is determined by the expected family contribution (EFC) from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which functions as a tool to ration scarce aid dollars. The lowest possible EFC under current rules is zero, but this obscures a wider distribution of family resources that would be partially uncovered if the EFC formula were not truncated at zero and negative values were allowed. In this paper, I estimate negative EFCs using student-level data from nine colleges and universities between the 2007-08 and 2011-12 academic year. I find a large amount of dispersion in the distribution of negative EFCs for dependent students and that between 20% and 90% of students (varying by whether the student files the full FAFSA or qualifies for a Simplified FAFSA or an automatic zero EFC) would qualify for a larger Pell Grant award if negative EFCs were allowed. Additional costs of funding a negative EFC could range from $1.6 billion to$7.2 billion per year, depending on assumptions regarding generosity

Book Review: Getting to Graduation: The Completion Agenda in Higher Education

Author reviews Getting to Graduation: The Completion Agenda in Higher Education, Andrew P. Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)

Do High Cohort Default Rates Affect Student Living Allowances and Debt Burdens? An Empirical Analysis

The federal government holds colleges accountable for their students’ cohort default rates (CDRs), with colleges facing the potential loss of all federal financial aid dollars if their CDRs are too high for three consecutive years. Yet a sizable portion of student borrowing is for non-tuition living expenses—funds that the college does not get to keep. In this paper, I examine whether colleges at risk of federal sanctions due to high CDRs respond by reducing living allowances in an effort to limit borrowing and if student debt burdens decrease after a college receives a high default rate. Using data from public two-year and for-profit colleges for students who entered repayment between 1998 and 2011 matched with living allowances and student debt levels from subsequent years, I find no evidence that colleges are engaging in these types of strategic behaviors in an effort to preserve access to federal student financial aid funds

The Lasting Effects of the Pandemic on Graduate and Professional Education

The coronavirus pandemic caused a shift in the American higher education system. Many institutions switched from in-person to virtual platforms. Since graduate and professional students are more likely than undergraduate students to enroll in a hybrid or online program, they were less affected by the transition to online education. However, the decrease in undergraduate enrollment during the pandemic further squeezed institutional finances showing a decline in international graduate enrollment in the United States. As universities place additional scrutiny on program finances, departments will face pressure to reduce the number of assistantships that are not supported by external grants and contracts, which will disproportionately affect international enrollment. Additionally, the large graduate and professional student loan debt and benefits they receive from repayment plans are issues. Congress and the U.S. Department of Education may pursue efforts to limit the benefits that graduate and professional students receive from the federal student loan program

Factors Associated with Parent and Student Debt of Bachelor’s Degree Recipients

Parent PLUS loans are a growing concern due to their limited income-driven repayment protections and their potential to maintain longstanding racial wealth gaps. Previous research has examined factors associated with student debt burdens of college graduates, but no research has examined factors related to parent borrowing for college. In this brief, I use newly-released College Scorecard data to explore student and institutional characteristics associated with federal student loans and Parent PLUS loans of two recent bachelor’s degree cohorts. I find meaningful differences in how certain characteristics are associated with student and parent debt, particularly gender, family income, and institutional selectivity

Institutional and State-Level Factors Related to Paying Back Student Loan Debt Among Public, Private, and For-Profit Colleges

In this study, we examine whether institutional-level characteristics, student demographics, and state conditions are associated with student loan repayment rates and cohort-level loan default rates. We separately explore these characteristics for each of four higher education sectors: public 2-year colleges, for-profit colleges, public 4-year colleges, and private 4-year colleges. We conduct a series of multiple linear regressions on a sample of 2,375 colleges. Estimates suggest that across all sectors except at for-profits, colleges enrolling a higher percentage of historically underrepresented students, including first-generation and African American/Black students, report lower repayment rates. Additionally, a higher percentage of students enrolled who file as independents for tax purposes, as well as lower levels of family incomes among independent students, and lower graduation rates are all associated with lower repayment rates, across all four sectors. With the exception of for-profit colleges, the factors associated with higher cohort default rates include a smaller percentage of Asian students, a larger percentage of first-generation students, and lower median household incomes at the state level. Factors related to one-year and five-year loan repayment rates are similar, indicating that students who struggle to make progress on repaying their loans soon after leaving college continue to struggle in the future

Do the effects of early childhood education programs differ by gender? A meta-analysis

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine gender differences in the effects of early childhood education programs on children's cognitive, academic, behavioral, and adult outcomes. Significant and roughly equal impacts for boys and girls on cognitive and achievement measures were found, although there were no significant effects for either gender on child behavior and adult outcomes such as employment and educational attainment. Boys benefited significantly more from these programs than girls on other school outcomes such as grade retention and special education classification. We also examined important indicators of program quality that could be associated with differential effects by gender