A new report from Ithaka S+R titled, “The Impacts of Emergency Micro-Grants on Student Success: Evaluation Study of Georgia State University’s Panther Retention Grant Program,” examines one of the nation’s pioneering retention and completion grant programs.
Micro-grants are a type of emergency financial aid aimed at supporting students with immediate financial need.
Since the Panther Retention Grants (PRG) began as a pilot program in 2011, it has awarded over 10,000 grants to Georgia State students. Eligible students in good academic standing that have exhausted all other sources of aid may receive automatic awards of up to $2,500 to clear unpaid balances and allow the students to remain enrolled for the term. 
Dr. Dara Byrne
There have been previous analyses done on the data from the PRG program that have shown positive impacts on students and institutional finances, but the analyses did not attempt to estimate the causal impacts of the program or identify other factors that may be driving the results, said Daniel Rossman, senior researcher, Ithaka S+R, and one of the report’s authors. The intention was to examine whether there are reasons or causes why grant recipients had better outcomes than non-recipients.
Researchers did two types of analyses, the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses and the difference-in-difference (DID) regression analyses to estimate the impact receiving a grant had on graduation outcomes and cumulative debt outcome. Both analyses showed the grants had significant impact on graduation within one term and three terms.
The OLS analysis showed that within one term of receiving a PRG, students had a graduation rate that was 15 percentage points higher than non-recipients. For Pell recipients and underrepresented minority students it was 14 percentage points. The impact decreased over time. Within three terms of receipt, the graduation rate of recipients was nine percentage points higher and within six terms it is five percentage points higher than the graduation rate of non-recipients. The DID analysis also shows diminishing impact over time.
PRG recipients accumulated $3,728 less debt compared to non-recipients, which researchers noted likely means they were enrolled for a shorter time and therefore accrued less fees and tuition.
