This report describes the methods and procedures used for the 2008 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:08). NPSAS is a comprehensive study of financial aid among postsecondary education students in the United States and Puerto Rico that provides information on trends in financial aid and on the ways in which families pay for postsecondary education. NPSAS:08 included important changes from previous NPSAS cycles in its sample design. For example, the student sample was augmented to oversample students who had received Academic Competitiveness Grants (ACG) and Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grants. This oversampling permitted inclusion of several new interview items, allowing policymakers to gauge student knowledge about these new grant programs. NPSAS:08 was designed to provide state-level representative estimates for undergraduate students within four institutional strata—public 2-year institutions; public 4-year institutions; private not-for-profit 4-year institutions; and private for-profit institutions for six states: California, Georgia, Illinois, New York, Minnesota, and Texas. However, sufficient comparability in survey design and instrumentation was maintained to ensure that important comparisons with past NPSAS studies could be made.
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