Staff Scholarly Work Focuses on Financial Aid

Senior associate director of financial aid and Grinnell alum Stephanie M. Haines ’14 has published an article entitled “Exploring Interventions and Policies to Boost Financial Aid Completion Rates: An Integrative Review” in the most recent issue of the Journal of Student Financial Aid. 

In her article, Haines reviews the literature on interventions and policies designed to get more students to apply for financial aid for higher education. She concludes that, while specific techniques and strategies have yielded positive results, additional policy changes need to occur to make the financial aid system easier and fairer to use. 

“I wanted to distill others’ work down to some best practices on how to engage students,” says Haines. 

Haines describes her work as “a call to action for advocacy to continue to improve on the financial aid process, making it easier for applicants while maintaining equitable distribution of financial aid funds.” 

As important as big, structural reform is to improving the financial aid system, small changes can yield big results. Haines learned through her research, for example, that breaking the financial aid process into a series of smaller steps and sending timely, individualized communications tied to where a student is at in the process can be effective in “helping people to understand their financial aid eligibility and plan ahead.” 

Haines, who received a master’s degree in education from Harvard University in 2015 and is completing a Ph.D. at Iowa State University, joined the Grinnell Office of Financial Aid in 2021. An Iowa native and former Iowa Meat Goat Queen, as she is proud to note, Haines began her career in financial aid as a student worker at Grinnell in 2010. 

Relating her research to her day-to-day work, Haines came away even more convinced than ever that “we need to find a balance in financial aid between what is easy and what is fair” to maintain an effective system.