Young people with foster care history need financial support to attain their educational goals. Are these young people getting the financial support they need for college? How do their financial aid packages compare with those of their peers? To answer these questions, the authors used data from the National Center for Education Statistics,…

Young people with foster care history need financial support to attain their educational goals. Are these young people getting the financial support they need for college? How do their financial aid packages compare with those of their peers? Does the Education and Training Voucher program meet their needs? If not, how can it be improved? To…

In an era of billions of dollars in outstanding student loan debt, researchers have posited that the U.S. News & World Report rankings continue to be an influential source of information for prospective students, yet these rankings do not include college affordability metrics in their ranking algorithm. As a result, this study performed a…

In 2004 and 2005, the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education (Pell Institute), sponsored by the Council for Opportunity in Education (COE), published two editions of "Indicators of Opportunity in Higher Education." In 2015, the commitment to documenting trends in higher education equity was renewed by publishing…

Introduced this year, "How America Pays for Graduate School" is a national study by Sallie Mae, conducted by Ipsos. This new study is designed to complement Sallie Mae's "How America Pays for College" report, which, for the last 10 years, has provided insights into how American families plan and pay for college, with a focus on…

The purpose of this study was to identify factors that influenced the college choice process for high-achieving, low-income African American students, and to understand the effect of the Gates Millennium Scholarship on their college choice. Drawing from the Gates Millennium Scholar Tracking Database, a College Choice Survey, and the Integrated…

One sees various efforts in developed as well as in developing economies to seek a greater participation of lower-income students in their nation's leading universities. Once lower-income students do enroll in a highly selective institution, what happens to them? How well do they do academically when compared to their more wealthy counterparts?…

The driving force behind the recent increase in financial aid for college education is the rapid growth of state merit-based grant programs that provide scholarships to students who meet predefined standards of academic preparation at the state level, and this trend represents one of the most pronounced policy shifts away from a long tradition of…

Study after study demonstrates that low-income students are severely underrepresented in higher education. In fact, the attendance rate of low-income students appears to be declining rather than growing. Individual Development Accounts or IDAs used for postsecondary education can help address the problem. With an IDA, youth can afford to enroll in…

With passage of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, the Higher Education Act (HEA) is now reauthorized. What effect will it have on U.S. higher education? Students receiving Pell grants will find that college is more affordable while those who feared that the government would exert control over learning outcomes have breathed a…

The New York State program of student financial assistance is broad and comprehensive, comprising an extensive network of low-tuition public colleges, scholarships for outstanding high school graduates, tuition assistance grants for use at public and independent colleges, and guaranteed loans to college students. The present scholarship and…