Early Awareness of College Financial Aid: Does It Expand Choice?

The historic goals of student financial aid have been to promote access and choice. Flint argues that, in the strongest sense of the word, choice should mean an expansion of the observed level or range of tuitions in colleges. He estimated a causal model of the influence of the awareness of financial aid programs on college choice using a sample of 823 Illinois parents. Path analysis results showed that college savings and awareness of financial aid possibilities had significant indirect effects on tuition levels in the colleges under consideration.