Categorizing Student Financial Aid
How would you categorize student financial aid in IMPLAN? We have the budget of an educational institution and one of the expenses is student aid, which we've come to believe is financial aid. Please give me a suggest, thanks!
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Hello Andrew, The overall goal when estimating the impact of an educational institution is to identify net new spending in an area that is attributable to the institution. Financial aid typically is a pass-through, some of which likely supports new spending in the area, and some of which does not. When an educational institution gives financial aid, it effectively is supplementing the income of its students (and possibly their families). You will need to consider who is receiving that aid, where they are located, and how they are spending money. Perhaps the aid allows students to spend money on housing, food, books, recreation, etc. If so, you should try to model that student spending directly (on commodities like real estate and restaurants, for example), in which case you would not include direct spending on financial aid in your model. Alternatively, perhaps the aid supplements the income of a family outside the study area, and the student would have come to the school regardless of the financial aid support. In that case, the financial aid would be a leakage from the model, and you would not want to include it. Make sure to be careful about modeling student spending at the university; for example, if you model both all university expenditures and student spending at a university bookstore, you would be double-counting that spending on the books, since they would be included in the university’s spending on books, already. On-campus housing can present similar issues. It might help to take a look at a couple case studies modeling the impact of higher education institutions: [url=support.implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=299]support.implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=299[/url] [url=support.implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=298]support.implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=298[/url] Additionally, we are linking to an article about estimating impacts of educational institutions. http://home.uchicago.edu/arsx/Pitfalls%20of%20Traditional%20Measures%20of%20Higher%20Education's%20Role%20in%20Economic%20Development.pdf Regards, IMPLAN Staff
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