Elise and Prachi want to find out the unmet financial need of Hispanic students for an endowment scholarship at their institution.
This session is intended for post-secondary institutions active with the Postsecondary Data Partnership.
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Transcript
Elise is her institution's provost.
Recently, she was contacted by a private donor who wants to establish an endowment to fund scholarships for Hispanic students. The donor asked that the scholarships be used to help as many students as possible to reach their third year of college. The amount that would be available each year for dispersement is $250,000.
Elise asks Prachi to research the need among this student population. Prachi logs into the institution's Postsecondary Data Partnership dashboards and selects the financial aid dashboard.
The first thing Prachi does is to set the academic year filter to the second year to represent students who are enrolled in their second year at the institution. Then, she clicks "edit" in the chart settings area. Then selects the race/ethnicity filter, deselects "all" and selects "Hispanic" students. Then she clicks "apply settings".
Now the dashboard reports Hispanic students who are in their second academic year. Prachi learns that on average, 77% of Hispanic students from 2017-18 to 2021-22 applied for federal financial aid. On average, 63% of Hispanic students from 2017-18 to 2021-22 had an unmet Financial need above $500 and the average unmet need of Hispanic students from 2017-18 to 2021-22 was $1,588.
Next, Prachi scrolls down to the first set of bar charts. For the most recent cohort, she sees that the average cost of attendance was $1,974, the average expected family contribution or EFC was $1,952, the average Grant Aid was $813 and the average unmet need was $884.
To better understand what factors may lead to higher unmet need within the institution's Hispanic population, Prachi scrolls down to the second chart and applies the gender dimension.
Now, the chart shows a bar representing female students, male students and students whose gender was not coded. Prachi filters the data to exclude those students whose gender is unknown.
Focusing on the red colored segments representing unmet financial need, Prachi notices that for 2017-18, female Hispanic students in their second year had a lower unmet need compared to their male counterparts but that changed in 2018-19. In 2019-20, female students had no unmet financial need on average while male students had a small unmet need. By 2020-21, the average unmet financial need of male students grew and by the most recent reporting year stayed high while female students continued to have their financial needs met. The average unmet need for Hispanic men in their second year of college was $2,785.
Because male Hispanic students in their second year of college have a high unmet financial need, Prachi decides to focus her attention on them. She adds an additional filter to include only male students.
The next question she needs to answer is: how many students could be included in the scholarship?
She scrolls down to the third set of reports. This chart shows the percentage of students in various categories of unmet need. She focuses her attention on the most recent cohort. The first three categories represent students whose financial needs are met or whose unmet needs were $500 or less. The fourth category represents male second-year Hispanic students who had between $500 and $2500 of unmet financial need. In that cohort, there were 15 students in this category. There were 19 students who had between $2500 and $55,000 of unmet financial need, 34 students who had between $5,000 and $155,000 of unmet financial need and 40 students who had more than $15,000 of unmet financial need in that cohort. So in total, there were 108 male second-year Hispanic students with unmet financial need more than $500.
Prachi drafts an email to Elise outlining the criteria that she is recommending male Hispanic students in their second academic year with unmet financial need more than $500.
Based on these criteria, they know that 108 students would have their financial need either fully or partially met with this new scholarship. To find out who these 108 students are, they would need to look at the financial aid analysis ready file.
A few days later ,Elise emails Prachi to let her know that the donor is pleased with their plan and wants to move forward. Elise asks Prachi for the list of current students who would be the recipients of this new scholarship. To find a list of current students with these characteristics, Prachi accesses the Clearinghouse's secure FTP site and downloads the financial aid analysis ready file and the cohort analysis ready file. The cohort analysis ready file is needed for metrics like ethnicity. Then she merges the data sets together. Next she filters the data using the established criteria, identifies the list of students and emails the list to Elise.
Luckily, most of those students are still at the institution. So a few weeks later, these students are notified that they are recipients of this new scholarship. In the future, Elise and Prachi will use the PDP to track the success of these scholarship recipients and future cohorts to let the doner know their impact on student enrollment and success.