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. In this report, the authors 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. They examine four points in time--the 2003-04, 2007-08, 2011-12, and 2015-16 academic years--but focus most of their discussion on changes between the first and last academic years in the period. Contrary to popular narratives about merit aid, they 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.