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Like others, people with severe mental illness are interested in developing work careers by increasing their knowledge and skills through education. This chapter provides an illustration of a young man who receives supported education services from an employment specialist and returns to school. In IPS supported employment, all clients are encouraged to think about whether further schooling would be an asset in developing their work lives. The components of supported education are parallel to those of supported employment and are carried out by employment specialists. Clients are assisted in obtaining financial aid information, completing financial aid applications and admissions applications, selecting courses and a study major, and developing good study habits and test taking skills. Employment specialists discuss with the client whether s/he is interested in receiving accommodations and/or services from the school’s disability services office. The whole treatment team provides supports to assist people with their educational goals.

In the 1960s and 1970s, federal financial support for doctoral students was very common, but this is not the case now. However, research assistantships (some of them provided through federally funded faculty research grants) are now more common today than teaching assistantships, although school-funded scholarships are equally common. About one third of the students surveyed received no aid at all, and not all of those who were promised financial support at admission received what had been promised. Open-ended comments from students suggested that inadequate financial aid was their biggest problem. Most had student loans, but other forms of personal indebtedness (e.g., home mortgage, credit card debt) were also common. Aid was especially limited for part-time students and for the later phases of doctoral study (after completion of coursework).

This chapter discusses financial aid granted by entities other than the institution the student attends. Federal financial aid has played an important role. The chapter begins with a brief history of federal financial aid policy and then describes the federal needs-analysis system that determines a family's ability to pay. The chapter also explains the types of federal financial aid that are available: grants, loans, work-study, and tuition tax credits. State financial aid programs also are important, and the chapter shows how they have moved away from need-based systems toward merit-based grants. Lastly, the chapter explores the growing importance of private financial aid programs. The final section of the chapter discusses the interactions among these different sources of financial aid.

Despite ample evidence that changes in net tuition do affect the college going decisions of students, there is scant evidence that increases in federal need-based financial aid actually have increased the college going rates of low-income students. This failure stems from the complexity of the system that determines eligibility for federal financial aid. Many have suggested simplifications of the system to make it more transparent. To stimulate discussion, this chapter suggests a more radical proposal, making federal financial aid an entitlement independent of income. This proposal is appealing because the most successful financial aid programs have been those with the simplest eligibility requirements. The chapter then compares and contrasts a dramatic simplification with the less radical proposals put forward by the Rethinking Student Aid Study Group and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. The chapter also discusses changes in federal student loan programs.

This chapter examines the transfer of financial aid through the use of the instruments of grants and loans or their combination. It suggests that the provision of aid is hard to justify because loans have been made to countries with low income, weak governance and high risk of default, while grants have been distributed across the spectrum of per capita income rather than being narrowly focused on high-risk countries. It contends that creditworthiness should affect the composition rather than the amount of the total resource transfer, such that a country with high absorptive capacity for aid but with low creditworthiness should receive large resource transfers in the form of grants.

This chapter uses an Internet survey of Protestant schools to find out why students of color are more or less likely to attend certain Protestant educational institutions. Analysis of these data indicates that there is very little Protestant colleges and universities can do to attract African Americans and Native Americans. However, a variety of diversity initiatives are correlated with the percentage of Hispanic and Asian Americans on campus. Furthermore, educational courses that deal with racial issues and student-led multicultural organizations are more highly correlated to the retention of a diverse student body than multicultural, antiracism, community, or non-European cultural programs.

This chapter explores the attitudes of minority students of color who attend Protestant campuses. A significant percentage of such students have racial attitudes like those of majority group students. However, minority students who have not adopted such attitudes struggle with the racial atmosphere on Protestant campuses. I term the first group “assimilated” and the second group “racialized” racial minorities. Both assimilated and racialized students of color lack faith in the general diversity programs but for different reasons. Assimilated students of color find such programs ineffective because they may offend majority group students; racialized students of color perceive the unwillingness of majority group students to acknowledge continuing racial problems as the reason such programs fail. Like majority group students, students of color are also more likely to perceive professors of color and diversity courses to be more helpful than general diversity programs; however; they did not tie this perception to personally liking a particular professor. Students of color also valued student-led multicultural organizations but only if they perceived these organizations as uniting, instead of dividing, students of different races.

The relationship with undergraduate students is responsible for the primary opinions that the public has about higher education. Popular culture creates an image that all college students are eighteen years old, live in residence halls, and are recent high school graduates who pay the full tuition rate. In reality, many college students are adult learners, do not live on campus, and most get significant financial aid. Recent economic studies show that there are large numbers of unserved college students in the United States who do not know that they can attend excellent colleges and that low-income students who do attend excellent colleges graduate at a very similar rate and achieve financial status that is very similar to wealthier students.

This chapter brings the story of the Egyptian intervention to a close. Covering the momentous year of 1967, it exposes the little appreciated link between inter-Arab tensions and the Arab–Israeli conflict and provides a revisionist interpretation of the Six-Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi–Egyptian struggle over Yemen. Egypt's defeat forced Nasser to confront the necessity of withdrawing his forces from the Arabian Peninsula and accepting Saudi financial aid. Both acts presaged a crucial shift in the regional balance of power in the late twentieth century as a result of the civil war in Yemen: the decline of Egypt and the rise of Saudi Arabia.

Clearly, more discussion of the purposes of doctoral education in social work is needed, because the social science model that is now dominant is not attracting enough students, perhaps because of a perceived lack of relevance to practice and service delivery concerns. Other issues in recruitment to doctoral study are discussed, including the need for higher amounts and longer duration of financial aid. More doctoral students need to feel part of a community of scholars; a national organization of doctoral students might help. Best practices in doctoral education to reduce time to degree and enhance student productivity should be disseminated and adopted more widely in social work. Given the reemergence of interest in the “clinical doctorate” in social work, wide discussion that involves stakeholders within and beyond social work education is needed.

With the creation of the first federal student loans as part of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the US postsecondary financial aid system was set on a path from which it has not fundamentally deviated in the intervening decades. While college financing has trended almost inexorably toward greater reliance on student borrowing as costs have outpaced families’ incomes, the major components of the financing “mix” have remained unchanged. Financial aid policy is sometimes tweaked around the edges to lighten the burden of student debt, give colleges a competitive edge, or address undesirable disincentives. For the most part, however, these reforms bear more resemblance to the classic “shell game” than to authentic innovations. What American students need are more powerful tools with which to approach their futures—tools that help them prepare for higher education, persist to completion, and then leverage returns on their degrees. What they get, however, are repackaged versions of the same blunt instruments. While everyone wants improved outcomes from our financial aid investments, the nation’s apparent inability or unwillingness to innovate truly novel approaches to paying for higher education stands in the way of progress. The goal of financial aid policy has been narrowly framed as only helping young adults pay for college, a low bar that completely ignores the role financial aid could play in influencing early education, postsecondary completion, and post-college financial health. As a result, instead of receiving support at critical junctures along the opportunity pipeline to a prosperous adulthood, students are largely left to their own devices except at the moment when the tuition bill becomes due. To capitalize on the resulting missed opportunities, the United States needs more than different loan repayment schedules or loosened rules on grant disbursement. What we need is a fundamental shift in how we think about financing higher education and what we believe about why it matters.

Undocumented children graduate from schools, and like others, want to attend college, where they no longer have the safe harbor of Plyler. Several states allowed undocumented college students to enroll and to gain residency status, which enabled them to pay lower tuition in public colleges. Then, in 1996, in an attempt to head off more stringently restrictionist statutes, President Clinton signed two important laws that tightened up borders and made it more difficult for the undocumented to gain legal status; these also made it more difficult for colleges to provide resident tuition, and the number of undocumented students—always small—dropped even further. Ironically, in 2001, Texas became the first state to accommodate and provide for resident tuition, and the Development, Relief, Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act was introduced into Congress. Although the DREAM Act has passed both houses of Congress, it was never synchronized to actually be enacted into law. Nonetheless, over a dozen states enacted laws that made resident tuition available to undocumented youths, now often referred to as “DREAMers,” and, in a handful of states, financial aid as well. A small number of states have banned these students either from enrolling or from receiving resident tuition.

Chapter 6 examines the effectiveness of federal financial aid policies in expanding women’s access to higher education and the social and economic building blocks of full citizenship. While the GI Bill significantly expanded men’s access to college, it offered very little support for women interested in pursuing college degrees. Subsequently enacted financial aid programs promoted greater gender equality in socioeconomic status by increasing the probability that women would attain advanced levels of education. By making college more affordable, increasing the amount of time that students can devote to academic work, and promoting undergraduate degree completion, student financial aid programs constitute central mechanisms by which US lawmakers have supported equal social citizenship for women and men. By significantly increasing women’s access to college degrees and the social and economic benefits that are associated with higher education, landmark higher education policies have supported women’s full incorporation into American society.

This chapter explores whether financial aid packages do or should affect students' college choices. It shows that the fascinating array of scholarships, grants, loans, and work-study programs exists because many parties want to alter meritorious students' college choices. The parties' objectives are diverse—from a purely altruistic desire to relax constraints facing the needy to a college's self-interested desire to enroll high-aptitude students who raise its profile or improve education for other students on campus. Their human capital and abilities are often thought to generate social spillovers. However, the behavior of high-aptitude students is also important purely for reasons of scientific inquiry. They are capable of the largest human capital investments in the nation. Observing them allows one to witness the forces that affect human capital investments at their most highly charged because the stakes are high.

During the Great Recession, the maximum federal Pell award grew over 32 percent in three years, the fastest rate in its history. Our research examines how states’ need-based financial aid policies responded to the economic downturn and this Pell program. Documenting tends in state and federal policies, we show a pattern that as many as half of the states have reduced the generosity of their financial aid programs during the Great Recession. This pattern of reducing generosity in the wake of increases in the Federal Pell Grant Program is not new, and our research shows that this potential fiscal federalism has become more common since 2000. We highlight specific policies in three states that illustrate this trend. We also use student-level data from Ohio to illustrate how students’ net aid packages changed in response to the combined changes in federal and state aid policy, finding that the state policy had disproportionate effects on the students with most need.

This chapter presents evidence on student perceptions of the economic benefits of college and the college application and financial aid process. It assesses the likely effectiveness of several policy responses aimed at reducing the gap in educational attainment between high- and low-income youths. The first hypothesis asserts that low-income students are relatively unlikely to attend college because they simply do not believe that it is profitable: they overestimate tuition, underestimate financial aid opportunities, and/or underestimate the market differential in wages for college versus high school graduates. Students in the Boston public schools and in a comparison (affluent) suburban school tend to overestimate tuition, but they also tend to overestimate the wage benefits of going to college. The second hypothesis asserts that low-income students are discouraged by the complexity of the process of applying for financial aid and college admissions, even if they are qualified and enthusiastic about going to college.

This chapter develops two themes that follow from our aerial view of higher education. First, we need to ratchet down the rhetoric that dominates current discussion of higher education. Phrases such as “college cost crisis” or “affordability crisis” are not warranted. The higher education industry faces a set of important problems, but the inflammatory rhetoric is based on a misdiagnosis of the causes of rising college cost. Second, we should focus on what can be fixed. Students at the bottom of the income distribution do find college increasingly less affordable. The problem is caused by higher college costs and stagnating incomes. We need to address this problem by making financial aid easier for students to access. In the long run, this will deal with both difficulties. Increasing access will increase educational attainment, and increasing educational attainment will reverse the process responsible for stagnating incomes.

This paper explores how the Great Recession affected college enrollment and costs to families. As with past recessions, reductions in income and increases in tuition prices could have had negative effects on enrollment, while growing unemployment could have had the opposite effect by reducing the foregone costs of attending school. However, the Great Recession occurred within a much more complex postsecondary context than ever before, with the prominence of student loans but the changing availability of debt, a major increase in the number of college-age students, and substantial policy changes in federal financial aid. The net effect of these positive and negative pressures is unclear. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), an annual survey of colleges and universities, I investigate how the Great Recession affected college enrollment levels, attendance intensity, tuition costs, and financial aid. The analysis suggests college attendance levels increased during the recession, especially in the states most affected in terms of rising unemployment and declining home values, but it was part-time enrollment that grew while full-time enrollment declined. The tuition revenue collected per student also grew, while grants did not offset the increase in cost, and student loan amounts also increased.