TY - JOUR AU - Carlson, Deven E AU - Elwert, Felix AU - Hillman, Nicholas AU - Schmidt, Alex AU - Wolfe, Barbara L TI - The Effects of Financial Aid Grant Offers on Postsecondary Educational Outcomes: New Experimental Evidence from the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 26419 PY - 2019 Y2 - November 2019 DO - 10.3386/w26419 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w26419 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w26419.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Deven E. Carlson University of Oklahoma Department of Political Science 205 Dale Hall Tower 455 W. Lindsey St. Norman, OK 73019 E-Mail: decarlson@ou.edu Felix Elwert University of Wisconsin-Madison 4426 Sewell Social Sciences Madison, WI 53706 E-Mail: elwert@wisc.edu Nicholas Hillman University of Wisconsin-Madison 1000 Bascom Mall, 249 Madison, WI 53706 E-Mail: nwhillman@wisc.edu Alex Schmidt University of Wisconsin-Madison 8128 Social Science Bldg. Madison, WI 53706 E-Mail: ajschmidt6@wisc.edu Barbara L. Wolfe 3458 Social Science Building University of Wisconsin Madison, WI 53706 Tel: 608/263-2029 Fax: 608/265-3119 E-Mail: BWolfe@wisc.edu AB - In this pre-registered study, we analyze the effects of need-based financial aid grant offers on the educational outcomes of low-income college students based on a large-scale randomized experiment (n=48,804). We find evidence that the grant offers increase two-year persistence by 1.7 percentage points among four-year college students. The estimated effect on six-year bachelor’s degree completion is of similar size—1.5 percentage points—but is not statistically significant. Among two-year students, we find positive—but not statistically significant—effects on persistence and bachelor’s degree completion (1.2 and 0.5 percentage points, respectively). We find little evidence that effects vary by cohort, race, gender or the prior receipt of food stamps. However, further exploratory results do suggest that the offers reduce associate’s degree completion rates for two-year community college students by around 3 percentage points, with no statistically significant evidence of effects on technical college students. We also estimate that the effects of actually receiving grant money are very similar, though slightly greater than the effects of merely receiving a grant offer. Overall, our results show only very small effects of the need-based grant offers on college students’ trajectories towards degree completion. ER -