Rethinking the Cooling Out Hypothesis for the 21st Century: The Impact of Financial Aid on Students’ Educational Goals

Most community college students from low-income families have ambitious educational degree goals, but only a small fraction attains them. For many decades, sociologists have primarily attributed this problem to a cooling out process in which college practitioners diminish students’ educational ambitions using academic reorientation processes that encourage the least-promising students to lower their degree goals. The cooling out explanation focuses exclusively on the actions of institutional community college actors rather than other factors affecting student decisions and thus has been used to vilify community colleges as engines of inequality. This article addresses an alternative hypothesis, considering whether student financial aid, the ubiquitous and multifaceted system that community college actors mainly do not control, influences students’ educational goals. Using data from an experimental study of need-based financial aid in Wisconsin, I find that a private grant program, which triggered a repackaging of students’ financial aid awards, decreased the educational degree aspirations and expectations of 2-year college students, on average. Although counterintuitive, this finding is consistent with the idea that the complex manner in which aid is delivered creates confusion and uncertainty about the actual costs of college. While these lowered degree goals persisted over time, they did not affect degree attainment rates, suggesting students’ expectations may be more malleable and less consequential than prior research suggests. This article demonstrates that the observed cooling out phenomenon is not necessarily the result of a meritocratic sorting system and involves processes previously neglected by sociological theory. A more robust model of college choices is needed