Changing Undergraduate Funding Mix and Graduate Degree Attainment

ABSTRACT

Previous studies of the role of college students’ funding sources in their educational outcomes have focused on individual funding sources and have not paid much attention to the mixing of multiple sources. As rising college tuition has heightened the financial burden on college students, the use of multiple funding sources has become an adaptive funding strategy for completing a college degree. Using discrete funding-source information from the National Survey of College Graduates, this study offers the first exploration of the change in funding mixes across three cohorts — born in 1953–1962, 1963–1972, and 1973–1982 respectively — and their association with graduate degree attainment. The proportion of students who utilized only one or two funding sources decreased, while those who juggled three or more sources increased. Contrary to the oldest cohort, for whom the association between undergraduate funding mix and graduate degree attainment was relatively weak, in the recent cohort, students mobilizing multiple sources became less likely to obtain a graduate degree compared to those fully funded by their families.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• college tuition
• funding sources
• graduate degree
• latent class analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Another available dataset is the Baccalaureate and Beyond (B&B) survey that follows BA recipients over 10 years and provides information similar to that in the NSCG. Unlike the NSCG, B&B has exact dollar amount information for some funding sources. However, except for the loan amount, the detailed undergraduate funding source information B&B offers refers not to students’ entire undergraduate education but only to the last academic year of graduating seniors. Furthermore, B&B does not clearly distinguish between family support and personal earnings. The cohort coverage of B&B is also more limited compared to that of the NSCG. For these reasons, we used the NSCG in this study, but future studies utilizing the advantages of B&B are warranted.

2. The NSCG started to collect respondents’ funding source information in 2013. The NSCG has also implemented a unique rotating panel design since 2010 in which, once sampled, each respondent is interviewed up to four times. As the inclusion of the same individuals multiple times causes a downward bias in estimating standard errors, we include each respondent’s first interview only.

3. The authors’ own calculation using the NSCG data indicates that the average age of degree completion for an MA is around 31 years, and for a PhD, it is about 33.

4. We do not argue that the funding source classification used in the main analyses is the only or ideal way to do it. Alternative classifications are possible. For a robustness check, we moved the G.I. Bill to the assistantships or work study category, personal savings to the personal earnings category, and/or loans from parents or relatives to the family contribution category. The results from these sensitivity analyses were almost identical to the main findings reported in this paper.

5. Results are not shown here but are available upon request.

6. The NSCG oversampled Asian Americans, resulting in a larger unweighted sample size.

7. We thank the Editor and Reviewers for pointing out these possibilities.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award SES-1801820).