Evaluating the short and medium-run impacts of student aid: evidence from an artefactual field experiment

Abstract This paper estimates the impacts of an experiment that provided Canadian high-school students with exogenous amounts and types of financial aid. We collected data ten years later to assess short and long-run effects on educational and financial trajectories. While the average impacts on enrollment, graduation, debt, and earnings appear to be limited in the overall sample, we find that loan offers have heterogeneous effects in different institutional environments, shifting students from two to four-year programs in Quebec while producing the opposite effect in other provinces. Our results also reveal that parents respond to financial aid by increasing their transfers, especially outside of Quebec and among students coming from lower-educated backgrounds. Among the latter population, we additionally find that raising grant amounts by $1,000 reduces the probability of completing the first program of study by 14pp, an effect that is not observed in the rest of the sample.