Core Advocacy Areas & Principles
Our advocacy efforts center around these major policy areas:
- Increasing access to higher education, including early awareness and outreach
- Simplifying student aid systems
- Encouraging college persistence & completion
- College savings and financial education
- Minimizing student indebtedness and emphasizing grant and work aid
- Supporting the primacy of need-based aid
Core Principles
Our advocacy efforts are guided by the following principles:
We believe that the purpose of student financial aid is to ensure everyone has equal access to postsecondary education. NASFAA affirms that student financial aid should:
- Promote fairness and equity for students across all sectors of postsecondary education, with a particular emphasis on low-income, underrepresented and underserved students;
- Stress the primacy of need-based aid;
- Support policies that address the needs of disadvantaged students;
- Advocate accountability;
- Encourage simplicity and predictability;
- Empower student financial aid professionals and their schools with the flexibility to respond to the specific needs of their students;
- Recommend policies that accommodate the breadth of academic delivery models;
- Encourage the responsible use of technology wherever possible;
- Eliminate statutory requirements that use financial aid to enforce unrelated social policies; and
- Validate proposed recommendations with research and data analysis wherever possible.
