College affordability and a clear understanding of financial aid are among the biggest challenges low-income students pursuing a higher education face. Education experts say that colleges and universities can play a larger role in increasing student success by changing their financial aid practices, according to a new report.
The new report by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation titled “Making College Affordable” offers 11 best practices for colleges and universities to implement in order to alleviate financial burdens on students. Institutional “practices that reflect the disparate realities of low-income students ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to succeed,” the report stated.
“For too long, students have been left out of the equation when it comes to college affordability,” said Dr. Zakiya Smith, strategy director at Lumina Foundation and author of the report’s foreword. “With this report, we can start to have a conversation about taking the onus off the student to figure out how to pay for college and putting it on institutions to provide students with better information to help them make more informed choices.”
Dr. Jennifer Glynn, director of research at the foundation, and Dr. Crystal Coker, a postdoctoral research associate at the foundation, are co-authors of the report, which is broken down into three categories to make the researchers’ findings “more clear” for administrators and financial aid officers who support students, Glynn said.
Each strategy falls under one of three categories: clarifying financial information, easing the financial burden and filling in financial aid gaps.
The researchers’ findings and suggested strategies stem from their academic research and their experience with the foundation’s scholarship program over the last 17 years. Several strategies emerged from observations by the foundation’s educational advisers of staff who work with high school seniors as they are getting their college acceptance and financial aid letters.
Further, Glynn and Coker’s report specifically calls attention to the “excellence gap,” a phenomenon where promising low-income students who score highly on standardized tests are less likely to obtain a college degree than their higher-income peers. According to the report, students from low-income families are one-eighth as likely to attend college and to graduate as students from high-income families.
