New Evidence on Need-Based Grant Aid
Ben Castleman and Bridget Long of Harvard University just issued a terrific new paper on the impacts of a Florida need-based grant distributed to students across the state. Using a rigorous regression-discontinuity design, the authors make several contributions to the study of the impacts of financial aid by tacking a couple of of tough questions: Does need-based aid promote college completion? Who benefits most from need-based aid? Is it the highest-achievers to whom merit aid is often targeted? They find that YES, need-based aid (without any performance criteria) produces strong and statistically significant impacts on credits earned and degree completion. Specifically the authors find that $1,000 more of grant eligibility increased the probability of staying continuously enrolled through the spring semester of students' freshman year by 3.3 percentage points, increased the cumulative number of credits students completed after four years by 2.3 credits, and increased the...