| 来源类型 | Report |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| The merit aid illusion: The hidden winners in a competition for affluent college students | |
| Jason D. Delisle; Cody Christensen | |
| 发表日期 | 2019-05-08 |
| 出版年 | 2019 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Key Points Higher education advocates commonly worry that public and private nonprofit colleges are increasingly providing merit aid scholarships to high-income students, leaving little financial aid leftover for low-income families. However, institutions can simultaneously inflate tuition prices and then offer grants, discounts, or scholarships back to students selectively—meaning merit aid scholarships could be nothing more than a notional discount. We find no evidence that the total financial aid that public and private nonprofit institutions provide to high-income students has increased relative to what they provide low-income students. Additionally, we find that the share of total financial aid that institutions provided to their low-income students increased between the 2003–04 and 2015–16 academic years. Read the PDF. Executive Summary There is widespread concern in the policy community that colleges and universities are increasingly shifting their financial aid budgets to favor students from high-income families. Observers often argue that institutions of higher education are offering more merit aid to the most affluent students, leaving less aid for their low-income peers. To draw these conclusions, many analysts simply count the amount of non-need-based aid that institutions of higher education report, which may actually be notional discounts on inflated tuition prices rather than real benefits. We use a more comprehensive approach that compares the net tuition that institutions charged students relative to what the institutions spent on each student, focusing on changes between the 2003–04 and 2015–16 academic years. The results contradict the claim that rising institutional aid has increasingly favored wealthy students. We find that the subsidies institutions of higher education provide to low-income students have increased relative to their high-income peers. Introduction Journalists and advocates have spilled a lot of ink in recent years warning that colleges are “lavishing” ever-larger financial aid packages on students from high-income families at the expense of low-income students.1 They attest that non-need-based aid or merit aid for high-income students is exacerbating inequities in the US higher education system. We are told that colleges are in an arms race to attract the most talented students and—in response to budget pressures—that they are increasingly desperate to enroll students from high-income families that can pay the highest tuition prices. To recruit these students, colleges are said to be outbidding one another with financial aid packages, leaving little aid leftover for low-income families that are priced out of these institutions. While this phenomenon was once limited to elite private institutions, many observers warn that public universities have now adopted the same practice, which has only intensified in recent years. The way that some advocates put it, merit aid amounts to “stealing from low-income students” or “Robin Hood in reverse.”2 Others add that, due to merit aid, “financial aid disparities are getting worse,” a trend that they say is “driven by politics, the pursuit of prestige and policies that have been shifting resources away from students with financial need.”3 They point to statistics about the growing sums that colleges spend on merit aid, and they profile students who received such awards. A recent Wall Street Journal article explained that “hundreds of colleges and universities are using academic scholarships and other merit-based financial aid to gain an edge in a battle for students,” noting that at George Washington University, aid for students with financial need was up just 4 percent over the past few years while aid to students without financial need was up 52 percent.4 Together, these reports can make it appear as though public and private institutions have made significant cuts in the amount of aid they offer to low-income students. Analyses like these, however, are missing key information. They overlook that the money flowing in and out of an institution of higher education is fungible and institutions can simultaneously inflate tuition prices and then offer grants, discounts, or scholarships back to students selectively. That means that merit- or need-based aid could be nothing more than a notional discount—money an institution transfers between its own accounts without actually affecting its bottom line. Simply counting up the millions of dollars in what the institution of higher education labels financial aid (hereafter referred to as “institutional aid” regardless of whether it is provided based on financial need, merit, or both) is therefore an imprecise and incomplete way to measure student aid. In this report we take a more comprehensive approach to measure the financial aid awards that students of different income groups receive at public and private nonprofit institutions and how those awards have changed over time. We examine four points in time—the 2003–04, 2007–08, 2011–12, and 2015–16 academic years—but focus most of our discussion on changes between the first and last academic years in the period. Contrary to popular narratives about merit aid, we find no evidence that the total financial aid that public and private nonprofit institutions provide to high-income students has increased relative to what they provide low-income students. If anything, the shift in the distribution of financial aid appears to have favored low-income students at the expense of high-income students. Read the full report. Notes |
| 主题 | Higher Education |
| 标签 | education ; financial aid ; Higher education ; low-income ; University |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-merit-aid-illusion-the-hidden-winners-in-a-competition-for-affluent-college-students/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/206670 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Jason D. Delisle,Cody Christensen. The merit aid illusion: The hidden winners in a competition for affluent college students. 2019. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| The-Merit-Aid-Illusi（727KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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