Top-50 Users of Federal Financial Aid Infrastructure
I built a 100-tab financial model to map out which universities use which pieces of financial aid infrastructure and to visualize how that has changed over time. All 6 financial ingredients (Direct Loan, Pell, PLUS, GradPLUS, GI Bill, and DoD TAP) are in-use at almost every university, but in different proportions.
Summary
This list surprised me. Nearly every sort of institution (for-profits, non-profits, fully-online, fully in-person) makes an appearance in the Top-50. Alltogether, this Top-50 list represents $425 billion deployed from 2010-2023.
To build it, I stitched together all of the data from the FSA’s Title IV Program Volume Reports, which is a neat data source because it is refreshed regularly (the latest data it reports is from 4 months ago). The FSA Volume reports do not have every data point, like GI Bill disbursements, so I pulled in that data from IPEDS’ SFAV tables.
Below is an inflation-adjusted (all dollars are 2024 dollars) rendering of the largest universities in America, from a Federal Financial Aid perspective.
Top-50 List ($425 billion deployed):
1. University of Phoenix
2. Adtalem Global Education Group
3. Strategic Education Inc (Nasdaq:STRA)
4. Grand Canyon University
5. Liberty University
6. Arizona State University
7. Southern New Hampshire University
8. Perdoceo
9. New York University
10. DeVry University
11. Penn State University
12. Purdue University Global
13. University of Southern California
14. Ashford University
Note: Ashford University was acquired by the University of Arizona in 2020 and is now known as the University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC).