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July 2003
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Money Matters
How Financial Aid Affects Nontraditional Students in Community Colleges
Victoria Choitz, Rebecca Widom
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In recent years, interest has
grown in the role community colleges can play in helping low-wage workers advance
out of poverty and toward economic self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, high attrition
rates among these nontraditional students limit community colleges’ success
in this arena. MDRC has identified three strategies that might enable colleges
to serve working adults more effectively: enhanced student services; curricular
and instructional innovation; and, the focus of this paper, supplemental student
financial aid. Examining federal, state, and institutional programs, the paper
presents a framework for understanding challenges to securing comprehensive
financial assistance for low-income working students. The paper identifies promising
approaches for supplementing student financial aid based on a range of programs
implemented in the past and planned for the future. It also raises issues that
bear consideration in designing a program that would be both effective in ways
that can be measured through random assignment studies and replicable.
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Funders
MDRC’s Opening Doors to Earning Credentials project, including the focus groups that are
described in this report, is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Other Opening Doors funders include: Annie E. Casey Foundation, Ford Foundation, Joyce Foundation,
KnowledgeWorks Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation,
Smith Richardson Foundation.
The findings and conclusions presented in this report do not necessarily represent the official positions
or policies of the funders.
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