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.
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 disbursement is $250,000.
Elise asks Prachi to research the need among this student population.
Prachi logs into the institution’s Postsecondary Data Partnership (or PDP) dashboards and selects the Financial Aid dashboard.
She changes the Academic Year filter to the second year to represent students who are enrolled in their second year at the institution. Then she clicks on “Apply Additional Filters,” selects the Race/Ethnicity filter, and selects Hispanic students.
Now, the dashboard reports Hispanic students who are in their second academic year.
Next, Prachi scrolls down to the first set of bar charts. She sees that the average cost of attendance for this population in 2018-19 was $23,574; the average expected family contribution, or EFC, was $10,096; the average grant aid was $7,492; and the average unmet need was $5,986.
To better understand what factors may lead to higher unmet need within the institution’s Hispanic population, Prachi applies multiple dimensions to look at higher amounts of unmet need.
When she applies the gender dimension, she notices a gap between Hispanic males and females. The average unmet financial need for female Hispanic students was $5,033 and $6,445 for male Hispanic students.
Because male Hispanic students have a higher unmet need, Prachi decides to focus her attention on them.
She scrolls to the top of the dashboard and adds an additional filter to include only male Hispanic students. She sees that the average unmet need for these students is $6,428.
The next question she needs to answer is, how many students could be included in the scholarship? She scrolls down to the bottom set of linked reports. The upper bar chart shows the percentage of students in various categories of unmet need.
She sees that approximately 13% of Hispanic male second-year students have up to $2,500 of unmet need; 13% of this cohort has between $2501 and $5000 of unmet need; 35% have between $5001 and $15000 of unmet need; and 16% have more than $15,000 of unmet need.
Because the donor wants to impact as many students as possible and there is a limit to the endowment, Prachi focuses her attention on the category with the most students, which is between $5,001 and $15,000. Although she is happy to see that the percentage of students in this category decreased over cohorts, she would like to see that trend continue, which this scholarship can help achieve.
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 between $5,000 and $15,000.
Based on these criteria,42 students would have their financial need met with this new scholarship.
A few days later, Elise emails Prachi to let her know that the donor is pleased with the 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, downloads the Financial Aid Analysis-Ready File, and the Cohort Analysis-Ready file. The Cohort Analysis file is needed for metrics like ethnicity.
Then, she merges the datasets together. Next, she filters the data using the established criteria, identifies the list of students, and emails the list to Elise.
A few weeks later, these students are notified that they are the recipients of this new scholarship.
In the future, Elise and Prachi will use the PDP to track the success of these students, and future cohorts, to let the donor know their scholarship’s impact on student enrollment and success.