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OTTAWA, October 7, 2010  —  Three new research briefs released today by the Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid (MESA) Project show that 42 percent of first year university students receiving student aid say that they would quit school entirely if government aid were not available to them. The MESA Project’s three research briefs are based on the new Longitudinal Survey of Low-Income Students (L-SLIS), for which just over 10,000 government student aid recipients in their first year of post-secondary education (PSE) in 2006 were interviewed.  Their progress was then followed through 2009.

“With these new data, we are finally able to see how students’ financing strategies evolve as they progress through PSE,” says lead author and University of Ottawa professor Ross Finnie. “We find that low income students draw on a number of different funding sources, but that student aid is the largest single component, and may be vital to keeping these students in school."

The first brief, focussing on student debt and borrowing, reports that 50 percent of students say they “would have borrowed more from their student aid system if they had been able to,” even though 48 percent are “concerned about their ability to pay back their debts.” In their sample of student borrowers, the researchers found that by the third year of their studies, students anticipated it would take 5.8 years for them to pay back their government debts.   They also found that over 43 percent of these students said they “plan to live with their parents until they can pay back some or all of their debt.” However, these plans were not necessarily driven by students’ debt levels per se.

The second brief, which details these students’ various funding sources, outlines how students appear to substitute employment income for government aid and scholarships after their first year, though total finances drop.  The authors found that among university students who received entrance awards, only 14.4 percent had their award continue in their second year, and only 9.4 percent into their third year. “This could be important information for students budgeting for their PSE careers,” says Professor Finnie.

The final report relates to students’ time use in PSE and describes the type of students on financial aid who are more likely to work while they are in school.  The report finds that students who live at home with their parents and students who receive smaller financial contributions from their families are more likely to work. “More work is linked to lower grades among university students, but not necessarily among college students,” states Professor Finnie. He suggests that “it is important to consider the relationship between aid, work and grades when evaluating student aid policies.”

All three briefs are co-authored by Ross Finnie, a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and Stephen Childs and Andrew Wismer of the MESA Project.   The L-SLIS was an initiative of the Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid (MESA) Project, a long-run research undertaking funded by the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation to evaluate the impact of CMSF Access Bursaries and to explore the relationship between finances, access and persistence in PSE. Further briefs will be released in the coming weeks, and additional reports will be published in the coming months.

The research briefs, Funding Post-Secondary Education, Student Borrowing and Debt and Time Use in Post-Secondary Education, as well as a general guide to the L-SLIS data, are all available online at www.mesa-project.org. [External site.]

These new research briefs complement the three first ones on students’ post-secondary education decisions and student retention released last week.