In financial aid, understanding how your awards are distributed across different income brackets can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness and strategy of your aid policies. Reviewing this distribution at the end of the financial aid season can help you assess whether your policies align with your mission and goals. The Clarity platform offers an income bracket report in the Insights section that provides income bracket-specific data. If you're not using Clarity, you can still analyze this data by exporting it and creating income brackets using pivot tables in a spreadsheet. For more details on how to do this, you can refer to our blog Data Tips and Techniques: Quickly Grouping Your Award Data.

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The Story Behind Your Financial Aid Distribution

The income bracket chart offers a quick and clear way to see the narrative of your financial aid policy. Typically, schools distribute more aid to families in lower-income brackets, a trend seen in many institutions. This approach ensures that those who need the most support receive it. However, not all schools follow the same strategy. Some schools may allocate more aid to middle-class families in order to address the "barbell effect," where aid at the low end (and wealth at the high end) of the income spectrum leaves the middle squeezed.

Each school makes its decisions based on its mission, resources, and priorities. The income bracket chart is a high-level tool that helps explain these distribution decisions to school administrators and, potentially, the school board.

Let's look at three example charts to illustrate the types of insights that income brackets can provide. In each of these three charts, we look at the median percentage of tuition covered by aid for families in a given income bracket. Note that we could also choose to chart the total amount of aid given to the families across income brackets: The charts in their current form help you understand to whom the aid is given, while looking at the sum of aid amounts would tell you more about the scale of the amount given to the different levels of income.

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Conclusion

Understanding how your financial aid is distributed across different income brackets is crucial for ensuring that your policies are effective and aligned with your school's mission. Whether you use Clarity's built-in tools or create your own charts using spreadsheet software, this analysis provides a high-level overview of your financial aid strategy. By regularly reviewing and adjusting your approach, you can ensure that your financial aid resources are used in the most impactful way possible, supporting a diverse and thriving student body.

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