A nearly $4 million Department of Education (ED) grant is enabling The Hope Center to collaborate with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) to undertake an initiative focused on small-dollar grants to help cash-strapped, low-income students complete their degrees. The five-year project is evaluating the impact of completion grants at 11 APLU member institutions. In the project’s first phase, we examined completion grants at seven universities to assess key features of completion grants programs, including how they are targeted and delivered to students and their impact on student financial aid. The results are discussed in a policy brief and journal article.
In the second phase, we conducted a randomized controlled trial of completion grants. The grants ranged from $500 to $3,000 and were awarded to students nearing degree completion. Read the pre-registered evaluation plan. Preliminary results are available in this working paper. Full results will be available in the second half of 2022.
This project is supported by the College Completion Network at the Institute for Education Sciences.
We are grateful to both our research partner, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities,
and our funder, Institute for Education Sciences, for making this work possible
The research reported here is supported by the Institute for Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305N170020 to Temple University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
