Community-College Students Need Better Financial Advising, Survey Finds

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By ERIC HOOVER

All the tutoring in the world cannot save students who run short of the money they need to pay for college. This year's Community College Survey of Student Engagement affirms as much.

In the survey, known as Cessie, nearly half (45 percent) of respondents cited a lack of finances as a hardship that would likely cause them to withdraw from classes or leave college — more than twice as many (19 percent) as those who cited a lack of academic preparation.

Fewer than half said their institutions provide "quite a bit" or "very much" of the financial support they needed to graduate, and more than a quarter said their colleges gave them "very little" help.

Those findings suggest that institutions must do more to familiarize prospective students with financial aid and to steer enrolled students through the complex application process.

"Very often we're expecting them to know things they have no way of knowing," says Kay M. McClenney, the survey's director and a senior lecturer in the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin. "We have learned that many, many students do not even know what the term 'financial aid' means."

This year's survey used data from a three-year cohort of colleges that participated in the survey in 2006, 2007, and 2008. The cohort includes more than 340,000 students from 585 colleges in 48 states, as well as British Columbia, the Marshall Islands, and Nova Scotia. National data from the survey are available in this year's report, "High Expectations, High Support," on the project's Web site (http://www.ccsse.org). Colleges received their institutional reports this summer.

The 2008 results, released this week, included a "special focus" on financial aid, with questions that do not appear on the core survey, which stays the same each year. One of the questions asked students whether they had submitted a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a complicated form that can frustrate prospective students, particularly those who need financial assistance the most.

"There are very large numbers of community-college students who are eligible for federal financial aid, but who do not apply for it," says Ms. McClenney.

According to this year's survey, more than half (56 percent) of community-college students completed the federal-aid form, known as the Fafsa. Most students who did not complete the form said they did not think they would qualify for financial aid (38 percent) or said they did not need financial aid (37 percent), while others cited an unspecified reason (18 percent).

Among those students who completed the form, 39 percent said they did not receive any form of aid, while 30 percent received scholarships or grants, or both. Smaller numbers of students received either loans (10 percent) or a combination of loans and grants (10 percent).

Although only a small fraction of respondents (5 percent) said the Fafsa's complexity prevented them from completing the form, the report indicates that percentage probably would increase if Cessie included prospective students who had not enrolled in college.

Making Services 'Inescapable'

The report emphasized that colleges must educate students about financial aid long before they apply to college — a task that also involves educating parents and families. A quarter of all students (25 percent), and nearly a third (30 percent) of those who completed the Fafsa, said they had first learned about financial aid from their parents or other family members. Respondents who were the first in their family to attend college were more likely than their peers to have first learned about the financial-aid process from high schools and colleges.

The survey also found a gap between the perceived importance of various campus services and the frequency with which students used them. For instance, while most students (78 percent) rated financial-aid advising as one of the most important campus offerings, relatively few students (17 percent) used it often. A third said they rarely or never did so.

In focus-group interviews, students often described frustrations related to financial aid. "When asked to describe an unsatisfactory experience at their college, students are most likely to discuss financial aid services," according to the report.

It suggests that community colleges can better support students by making key services mandatory, integrating them into course work, and providing them at convenient times and places for both fulland part-time students.

The report includes information about how some colleges have improved their financial-aid services. At Southeastern Technical College, in Georgia, for instance, officials determined that students were waiting too long to start the Fafsa — and that they found the online form easier to use than the paper version.

So financial-aid staff members started a new practice: walking students to the library, which was nearby, and sitting down with them at computers. There, they helped students log on the Fafsa Web site and start their applications. Southeastern Technical also told all preadmission counselors to bring students to the financial-aid office following their session.

Those changes helped reduce both long lines and paperwork at the financial-aid office, they and allowed students to receive their awards faster.

"Our job is to make our services inescapable, and not just throw the dice," Ms. McClenney says. "At community colleges, we've never had a shortage of creative programs that serve a small number of students. What's increasingly important is to increase the scale to serve all students."

WHO GETS AID AT 2-YEAR COLLEGES At community colleges, 56 percent of students say they filled out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form. Here's the aid they received: Part-Time Students Scholarships/grants and loans 8% No aid 46% Scholarships/grants 26% Don't know yet 11% Loans 9% Full-Time Students Scholarships/grants and loans 12% No aid 31% Scholarships/grants 36% Don't know yet 10% Loans 11% SOURCE: Community College Survey of Student Engagement