Contract Closed

Understanding How Colleges Implement Satisfactory Academic Progress Requirements and Their Implications for Federal Financial Aid

NCEE Evaluation Division Postsecondary, Adult Education, and Choice Studies

Program: Higher Education Act

Evaluation topic(s): Pathways to Career or College – College Access, Success, and Financial Aid

Award amount: $2,159,250

Awardee:

Mathematica

Year: 2024

Duration: 5 months (09/30/2024 - 02/10/2025)

Project type:

Implementation Study

Contract number: 9199022A017/9199002F0369

Background

While higher education remains a critical determinant for economic mobility in the United States, high tuition costs pose barriers for millions of students. Each year, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) provides approximately $112 billion in grant, work-study, and loan funds to help over 10 million students pay for postsecondary education. According to Title IV of the Higher Education Act, students must meet requirements for making satisfactory academic progress (SAP) to continue to receive this aid beyond their first year – a policy intended to ensure that students are successfully working toward completing their degree. FSA carries out the policy by establishing minimum cumulative GPA and course completion rate requirements for institutions of higher education to use in determining whether students demonstrate SAP. But those institutions have the flexibility to set more stringent requirements and to implement and monitor their requirements as they choose. Little is currently known about how the SAP requirements and procedures of institutions vary, are communicated to students, or affect students’ progress toward degree completion. This first evaluation would have described implementation of SAP at a national level and explored the feasibility of possible future studies that could have helped to identify suggestions for refining the federal SAP policy.

Project Activities

Research question

To what extent do higher education institutions use the flexibility in federal SAP policy to implement requirements in ways that may enhance student persistence and completion or, conversely, limit students’ access to needed federal student aid?
What methods and data are needed to rigorously examine the impacts of higher education institutions’ SAP requirements and procedures on students’ access to federal aid, college persistence, and credential attainment?

Structured Abstract

Design

The study was descriptive and would have collected information about SAP requirements and procedures from nationally representative samples of institutions of higher education. High level information such as IHEs’ minimum GPA and rate of completion requirements was to have been extracted from the websites of a nationally representative sample of approximately 1,250 institutions. More detailed data about IHEs’ SAP procedures, including how they institute warnings, appeals, and probation processes and the number of students subject to these processes, was to have been obtained from a subset of 400 of these institutions through surveys and program records collection.