As Tuition Increased, So Did Grant Aid

Lam Thuy Vo/NPR

Tuition at many colleges has more than doubled in the last decade — but so has financial aid from grants and scholarships students don’t have to pay back.

A graph from Planet Money shows the average student receives about $7,000 in grant money, an increase of more than 50 percent since 2001. There’s also a breakdown of how financial aid has changed in the last 10 years. NPR‘s Lam Thuy Vo writes:

The federal government is clearly the largest provider of financial aid, by far. That fact hasn’t changed over the past decade.

But federal grants have increased significantly in the past five years. During the same time, private loans have fallen sharply. Those two trends are related: A bill passed in 2010 changed the financial aid landscape significantly, reducing the role for private lenders and expanding federal grants.

Earlier this year, the folks at Planet Money compared how net price and sticker price have increased at public and private colleges. They’ve also looked at how much Americans owe in student loans compared to other kinds of debt.