I am presenting a paper, “Exploring Trends and Alternative Allocation Strategies for Campus-Based Financial Aid Programs,” at the Association for Education Finance and Policy’s annual conference this afternoon. Here is the abstract:
Two federal campus-based financial aid programs, the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (SEOG) and the Federal Work-Study program (FWS), combine to provide nearly $2 billion in funding to students with financial need. However, the allocation formulas have changed little since 1965, resulting in community colleges and newer institutions getting much smaller awards than longstanding private colleges with high costs of attendance. I document the trends in campus-level allocations over the past two decades and explore several different methods to reallocate funds based on current financial need while limiting the influence of high-tuition colleges. I show that allocation formulas that count a modest amount of tuition toward financial need reallocate aid away from private nonprofit colleges and toward public colleges and universities.
And here are the slides from my presentation, summarizing the study (which is still a work in progress). Any comments are greatly appreciated!
Robert Kelchen 