Report Shows Indiana Financial Aid Program Helps Low-Income Students Attend College

Most technology-based economic development programs recognize the need to have more people in their states or communities who have received bachelor degrees or higher. Bringing low-income populations into a knowledge-based economy is particularly difficult because of the two significant obstacles low-income students face for college access: insufficient financial aid and inadequate academic preparation.

According to a report released last week by the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Twenty-first Century Scholars Program, Indiana's state financial assistance initiative, helps low-income Indiana residents overcome those obstacles. The program also may help address "brain drain" concerns when a state experiences a net outmigration of college graduates.

Meeting the Access Challenge: Indiana's Twenty-first Century Scholars Program notes that students who participated as Twenty-first Century Scholars were significantly more likely than non-Scholars to enroll in college. Of the 2,202 Scholars in the study sample, 1,752 — nearly 80 percent — enrolled in an Indiana college or university within one year of high school graduation.

African-American and other minority students were more likely to enroll in public two-year colleges than white students. Students from urban and rural locales were also more likely to enroll in two-year colleges than students from suburbs or towns.

The Indiana Education Policy Center at Indiana University Bloomington conducted the study for the Lumina Foundation to evaluate the effectiveness of the Twenty-first Century Scholars Program in promoting college access. The research model employed compared students who enrolled in college with a reference group that did not enroll. The model controlled for several factors widely documented to affect enrollment patterns, including race, geographic locale and grade point average.

The advantage of the Twenty-first Century Scholars Program, the research suggests, is its two-pronged public policy strategy to promote a college-preparatory curriculum and guarantee adequate financial aid. The evidence also suggests that student aspirations, student middle-school grades, the presence of parents who attended college and residence in a town or suburb are positively related to student enrollment in public four-year colleges and Indiana independent colleges.

Indiana's Twenty-first Century Scholars Program began in 1990. The program essentially establishes a contract between the State of Indiana and low-income, middle school students, who promise to meet certain academic and behavioral standards while taking the steps necessary to prepare for college. The State of Indiana, in turn, promises to provide scholarships sufficient to cover in-state tuition at an Indiana public college or university or its equivalent at an Indiana private college. The study showed that students who completed their end of the contract were more likely to enroll in college. The principal eligibility requirement for Twenty-first Century Scholars is that each student must qualify for the federal Free and Reduced Lunch program in the eighth grade.

Meeting the Access Challenge is available under New Agenda Series publications at the Lumina Foundation: http://www.luminafoundation.org