First-of-its-Kind Report Sheds Light on Experience of Indigenous Students

Indigenous students are struggling to make ends meet while pursuing their education and supporting their families and communities. To ensure Native American scholars can earn their degrees, institutions need to be more transparent about the true cost of college, expand campus-based tuition and fee waivers, boost emergency aid, and purposefully gather data on their Indigenous students instead of grouping them into the catchall demographic, “other.”

That’s the conclusion of the first-of-its-kind report from the National Native Scholarship Providers (NNSP), a collection of the four largest Native American scholarship organizations: the American Indian College Fund, the Cobell Scholarship, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), and Native Forward Scholars Fund.

The report, National Study on College Affordability for Indigenous Students, is a collection of qualitative and quantitative data from 2,789 current and former NNSP scholarship recipients, representing 172 Tribal Nations, who enrolled at any postsecondary institution. NNSP leaders believe it is likely the largest data set on Indigenous students in existence.

“This may be the first time campus administrators have had Indigenous-centric information on college affordability variables from which to inform their financial aid practices,” said Dr. John Garland, director of research and student success at the Cobell Scholarship. “I think there are specific data points in this study that may be somewhat surprising to campus administrators, especially when it comes to how scholars are perceiving their campus-based fees and the negative effect fees are having on Indigenous students.”

According to data published by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2021, only 36.2% of Native American students entering four-year colleges and universities in 2014 were able to complete their degrees in six years, compared to 60.1% of all other students.

The report found that financial struggles can start as soon as freshman year for Indigenous students. The majority of current scholarship recipients reported their household income as less than $35,000 a year, and over half of all respondents indicated they could not save money before enrolling in college. Seventy-two percent of current scholarship recipients reported they ran out of money at some point within the last six months.

“That means you have food insecurity, housing insecurity — you have to make a really challenging decision about what to pay for,” said Dr. Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and CEO of The American Indian College Fund. “So many of our students also contribute to their family’s income — basically, students that don’t have their various basic needs met, it impacts not just them but their dependents and family.”