Asset Building Financial Inclusion Working Paper

“You Pay Your Share, We’ll Pay Our Share”: The College Cost Burden and the Role of Race, Income, and College Assets

Changes in financial aid policies may place too much of the burden of paying for college on students. In addition, incentives for accumulating college assets may exacerbate the college cost burden on minority and lower income students. Our study investigated the impacts of these policy changes on college cost burden using trivariate probit analysis with predicted probabilities. We find that recent changes in the financial aid system place a higher responsibility on African American, Latino/Hispanic, and moderate-income students to pay for college themselves. an implication is that greater opportunities for more and higher dollar grants and scholarships at 4-year colleges are needed for African Americans. Further, there is a need to create more grants and scholarships that target Latino/Hispanic students as well as moderate-income students at both 2-year and 4-year colleges. We also find that students are less likely to pay for college with student contributions when parents open a savings account, start a state-sponsored savings plan, or open a college investment fund . However, nonminority and higher-income families are more likely to have college assets than their counterparts. Therefore, we suggest an additional strategy to to reduce the college cost burden on students is to create policies that will encourage accumulation of college assets among minority and lower-income families.

The paper was presented during the Assets and Education Symposium, a March 2012 conference cosponsored by the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare and CSD. The symposium was convened to explore the role of savings and asset holding in post-secondary educational achievement. Many of the original conference papers are accessible in the center’s online collection and were subsequently developed for publication in Assets and Educational Attainment: Theory and Evidence, a special issue of Economics of Education Review.

Subsequent publication: Elliott, W., III, & Friedline, T. (2013). “You pay your share, we’ll pay our share”: The college cost burden and the role of race, income, and college assets. Economics of Education Review, 33, 134–153. doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2012.10.001

Project: College Success

Citation

Elliott, W., III, & Friedline, T. (2012). “You pay your share, we’ll pay our share”: The college cost burden and the role of race, income, and college assets (CSD Working Paper No. 12-09). St. Louis, MO: Washington University, Center for Social Development.