Community college completion rates are extremely low, especially among low-income students. One potential explanation is that low-income students have limited capacity to overcome financial shocks, such as large medical, legal, or car repair bills. Some programs offer “emergency financial assistance” (EFA) to prevent these events from curtailing educational progress. We test the...
How to deal with academic fascists: revoke their financial aid
This is pretty funny: When a group of New York University students began occupying the staircase of a campus building last week, they initially planned to stay indefinitely, or at least until their demand for a meeting with the school’s board of trustees was granted. Instead, the students departed within forty hours, after the university phoned their parents, warning of a possible suspension that...
How much do we lose to student aid fraud rings?
Using our E-Fraud Data Analytical System, we determined that the population of recipients considered as potentially participating in this fraud activity had increased 82 percent from award year 2009 (18,719 students) to award year 2012 (34,007 students). We identified more than 85,000 recipients who may have participated in this type of student aid fraud ring activity and who received over $874...
22-year-old spends $90,000 trust fund in three years of college
Seems almost too good to be true: The woman, a 22-year-old college junior named Kim, who did not give her last name on air and was allowed to use a voice disguiser to even further shield her identity, came to the three hosts with a confession: in just short three years she had managed to blow through a $90,000 college fund left to her by her grandparents. Kim has one year left of school and no...
Do you do financial aid research …
… and would like to reach an audience beyond academics?
Contact Charlotte Pollack (pollackc@nasfaa.org) about your research. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators sends precis of interesting financial aid research papers to its members on a regular basis.
The importance of financial resources for student loan repayment: evidence from Canada
Government student loan programs must balance the need to enforce repayment among borrowers who can afford to make their payments with some form of forgiveness or repayment assistance for those who cannot. Using unique survey and administrative data from the Canada Student Loan Program, we show that nearly all recent borrowers with annual incomes above $40,000 make their standard loan payments...
There is no student loan problem
Don Heller nails it in this Washington Post op-ed, my favorite quote:
It is not uncommon to read stories about college students who say, “I woke up one day and realized I had $50,000 in outstanding student loans and had no idea how I got there.” And yet nobody would accept at face value someone stating, “I woke up one day driving a Mercedes and had no idea how I was $50,000 in debt.”