By Hilda Hernández-Gravelle, Senior Research Fellow

"It is like the white house on the top of the hill," a staff member I interviewed at a community college said to describe the way many Latino / Hispanic students and their families view financial aid. The idea of receiving a free scholarship or financial assistance that does not need to be repaid seems too good to be true. Consequently, sometimes students do not apply for the financial aid they are eligible for.

There are other cultural factors for Latinos that can contribute to difficulties securing financial aid services and become impediments to college access. Some of these include: fear of debt; mistrust of lenders; and conflicts between family financial obligations and educational aspirations. While Latinos generally have a strong commitment to education, many believe that if you can't afford to pay for it up front, you can't attend. Such assumptions, along with a lack of awareness in the higher education sector about other cultural differences, make college seem unattainable to students who might otherwise be able to attend. The Los Angeles Times published an excellent story on this phenomenon in January 2007.

Attention to the challenges faced by Latinos in higher education is beginning to grow in the college access field. The Lumina Foundation just completed an important dynamic rich media report and web site on access and success for Latinos. Excelencia in Education also recently released survey results on enrollment and attainment for Latino students. The Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles released a report at the beginning of this month on the "mismatch" between Latino students’ aspirations and experiences titled, "An Examination of Latina/o Transfer Students in California's Postsecondary Institutions."

At the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, held in Orange County California in March 2007, Mari Luna De La Rosa and I presented The Strategy of Debt: How Hispanic Students Pay for College.This presentation introduced financial aid data and cultural factors that affect how Hispanic students use available aid. In an interactive presentation, we heard the perspectives of financial aid service providers and college administrators, highlighting the need to be aware of and responsive to cultural differences in financial aid service delivery.

The presentation was well-attended and received, demonstrating the need for dissemination of information that shapes understanding of financial aid among different groups. Given the debt aversion that exists among Hispanic students, and the resulting impact on college access, the Institute will explore how to better inform Hispanic students, families and administrators about college costs, debt, and the financing of higher education.

Posted by Edie Irons at 10:10 AM | Permalink

By Deborah Frankle, Research Analyst

Tuition discounting is the practice of using institutional aid to adjust tuition levels to best match what students and families are willing to pay, a widespread trend that is tracked by annual reports from the College Board.

We recently used publicly-available federal data to get a sense of the phenomenon at private four-year institutions, and were surprised to find that almost half of private, four-year institutions with at least 1,000 students provide discounts to 90% or more of their students. Four out of five colleges (83%) provided discounts to at least half of their students. In many cases, the average discount was quite large.

What does this mean? Actual discounting strategies vary dramatically between colleges, and the numbers above do not distinguish between need-based and merit-based aid. Some colleges use their institutional aid to help meet the financial need of low-income students, increasing access; others use it to attract students with less or no need who serve to maximize the prestige of the institution. Because we cannot distinguish between pricing and aid strategies at individual colleges, we cannot say for sure.

But one recent analysis suggests that the overall picture is troubling: institutional aid, a larger source of financial aid than state and federal aid combined, goes to higher-income students at rates far exceeding those of federal and state aid. For dependent students, 46% of institutional need-based grant funding went to those with family income above the median, compared to 3% of federal aid.

Why is this interesting? These issues bring up a number of questions:

• When institutional aid ($10 billion) far outweighs federal and state aid combined ($7 billion), what does it mean for college access that institutional aid tilts to those with higher incomes? (NPSAS, dependent students only)
• What does 'need-based' aid mean when it’s almost evenly distributed across all income levels?
• What is the point of tuition increases when almost all students receive a discount? Does the "sticker shock" of high tuition scare low-income students away before they learn about available discounts?
• Should detailed institution-level data on discounting practices be made public?

Other resources on this topic:

Tuition Discounting, Not Just a Private College Practice, College Board

Tuition Discounting and Prudent Enrollment Management, Association of Governing Boards

Posted by Edie Irons at 2:29 PM | Permalink

Robert Shireman, the founder and president of The Institute, has been guest-blogging for Higher Ed Watch, a higher education news and policy initiative from the New America Foundation. In his final post, "Building Fences," Shireman argues that state policies that use college funding as a carrot to keep students in the state after graduation are counterproductive. Here is an excerpt:

But states don’t like to see those graduates leave, so they have been getting more creative in their efforts to keep graduates from jumping the fence. Some states, for example, are considering, proposals that are modeled after the Georgia Hope Scholarship Program, which provides free tuition to top students who stay in state for college. Others are debating plans to award scholarships that would be rescinded if a graduate decided to cross the border for a job.

The current debate in Washington on immigration underscores just how backwards and wasteful these state strategies are. Corporate America is concerned that the immigration bill does not allow for enough visas for immigrants to fill jobs that Americans do not have the skills to fill. This cries out for a domestic policy response that focuses on increasing the number of young people who go on to college and complete degrees. . .

At The Institute for College Access and Success, we believe that Congress, as part of the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, should create a College Opportunity Incentive Fund to send a strong signal to states about the national imperative to improve college access and success rather than to build fences between states. The Fund would essentially provide a bounty to the state for every student from the lower half of the country’s family income distribution. In addition, the Fund would offer a double bounty for every degree conferred on a lower income student. The states could use the money to provide much-needed financial aid and to implement other strategies to expand access and to improve retention to graduation.

Posted by Edie Irons at 1:25 PM | Permalink