Buying time: Financial aid allows college students to work less while enrolled

Drew M. Anderson and Melanie A. Zaber

Economics of Education Review, 2025, vol. 108, issue C

Abstract: Many empirical studies have found that financial aid improves college attainment. Few have been able to test why. This study used administrative records of employment and earnings to get a more complete picture of students’ finances during college and test one potential mechanism: financial aid buys students time by allowing them to work less in off-campus jobs. We studied recipients of New Jersey’s need-based Tuition Aid Grant (TAG). We used the eligibility cutoffs of TAG to identify groups of otherwise similar students who received sharply different amounts of aid. A prior study took the same approach and found that TAG increased on-time graduation rates from public universities. At these schools, 80 percent of TAG recipients worked at some point during the year. This study found that when students received additional aid, on average they reduced earnings dollar for dollar.

Keywords: Postsecondary education; Financial aid; Student labor supply; State policy; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775725000664
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:108:y:2025:i:c:s0272775725000664

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102686

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().