The federal system of student financial aid is broken. Information about aid eligibility is hidden behind a thicket of complicated paperwork, and is also highly uncertain. Concrete information arrives just a few months before or even months after students enroll in college - far too late to...

A growing body of empirical evidence shows that some financial aid programs increase college enrollment. Puzzlingly, there is little compelling evidence that Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, the primary federal student aid programs, are effective in achieving this goal. In this paper, we provide...

The federal system for distributing student financial aid rivals the tax code in its complexity. Both have been a source of frustration and a focus of reform efforts for decades, yet the complexity of the student aid system has received comparatively little attention from economists. We describe...