Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Our paper leverages the random assignment of a need-based financial aid grant offer—the Fund For Wisconsin Scholars (FFWS) grant—and several sets of administrative records to provide experimental evidence on the effect of a sizeable financial aid offer on students’ educational outcomes for nine cohorts of students. Our paper separately estimates effects for students attending four-year universities, two-year colleges, and technical colleges—a unique contribution. We also assess temporal heterogeneity in effects due to the economic changes over the time period of interest (2009-2017).

Background on the Fund For Wisconsin Scholars

The Fund for Wisconsin Scholars was established in 2007 with a private founding gift of $167 million. The goal of FFWS is to increase postsecondary access for economically disadvantaged students in Wisconsin, which the FFWS works to achieve by providing need-based grants of $1800 (2-year institutions) or $4000 (4-year institutions) per annum. A student is eligible if she graduated from a Wisconsin high school, attends one of the 13 four-year universities, 13 two-year colleges that are part of the University of Wisconsin (UW) System, or 16 Technical College Institutions, and is eligible to receive a federal Pell Grant.

These 42 institutions use internal data to identify all students who meet the award criteria. The institutions send their eligible student list to the Wisconsin Higher Educational Aids Board (HEAB), which randomly assigns students to receive a FFWS grant offer. Those offered receive an award letter that they are instructed to sign in order to access the funds. Once awarded, students have their FFWS grant automatically renewed—up to a maximum of ten semesters—as long as they make satisfactory academic progress.

Research Questions and Data

In this paper, we estimate the effect of the FFWS grant offer on students’ postsecondary persistence and completion. Specifically, we ask:

1. Does a FFWS grant offer increase the likelihood that students will maintain consistent enrollment (via persistence or transfer) in the years following the FFWS grant offer?
2. Does a FFWS grant offer increase the likelihood of on-time degree completion?

To address these questions, we compiled a dataset containing a wide range of annual information on every student eligible to receive an FFWS grant. These include comprehensive postsecondary enrollment and completion information from National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) records as well as data on students’ high school careers, including their district and school of attendance, and their demographic characteristics.

Our sample consists of nine cohorts of students eligible to be randomized to the scholarship: 26,661 four-year entrants, 6,340 two-year entrants, and 13,760 technical school entrants. The set of outcomes we examine differ in their temporal proximity to the FFWS grant offer and, as such, our sample size varies depending on the outcome of interest. For short-term outcomes like persistence, our analyses rely on the full nine cohorts of students. For longer-term outcomes like on-time graduation from a four-year university, our analyses rely on as few as six cohorts of students.