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State lawmakers awarded about $14.9 billion in student financial aid in the 2021–22 academic year, a 1 percent increase compared to the year before, according to an annual survey by the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs, an association of state agencies that administer state-appropriated financial aid dollars.
NASSGAP president Irala Magee said in a press release Tuesday that the year-to-year change in state aid appears “relatively small.”
However, “it looks much stronger when you consider that while full-time equivalent (FTE) undergraduate enrollment dropped by 2.6% from the prior year, grant aid per undergraduate FTE rose by over 3% and need-based grant aid per undergraduate FTE rose by over 4%,” she said.
The release emphasized that 2021–22 was a time when state resources were “severely challenged” and that the small change amid “massive demands on overall state funding” ahead of that year “reaffirms that state decision makers continue to believe in the long-term value of postsecondary education and student financial aid as a valuable tool to achieve their state’s educational and economic goals.”
The majority of state aid, 87 percent, was distributed as grants, which equaled roughly 4.1 million grants totaling about $13 billion, up slightly from $12.9 billion the year prior, according to the survey. Most of the grant money, 73 percent, was need-based aid, a finding consistent with past years. States provided about $1.9 billion in nongrant aid, including loans and work-study; tuition waivers made up 48 percent of those funds.
Eight states accounted for 68.7 percent of all need-based undergraduate aid, a total of about $6.4 billion. Those states included California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington. At a per-capita level, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington gave out the most grant aid.
