Newcomer Students in Virginia: An Analysis of Financial Aid Access and Safety Net Participation

• In Event: Newcomer Students' Pursuit of Higher Education in the United States: Examining Access and Returns

Abstract

As financial barriers to postsecondary education in the United States persist (Gallup and Lumina Foundation, 2024), researchers and policymakers have started looking beyond financial aid to social safety net access as a critical tool in holistically supporting low-income students (Freudenberg et al., 2019, Rothstein et al., 2024, Stewart & Goldrick-Rab, 2025). Successful receipt of safety net benefits has been shown to reduce financial insecurity (Hu et al, 2016, Allen et al., 2019, Cox et al., 2024) and may ease the tradeoff between work and education (Vivalt et al., 2025). Yet, processes for accessing both financial aid and safety net benefits present significant administrative burden to students, complicating initial and sustained access.

For newcomer students (defined here as those eligible for benefits through the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)), these barriers can intensify. While this group enjoys privileges to the federal safety net and federal student aid that other immigration statuses do not allow, little is known about actual rates of uptake (see AlFakhri & Laura Bellows and Bernstein et al., 2023). Recent qualitative work has theorized that language barriers, lack of institutional knowledge, early work expectations, and the “chilling effect”  may attenuate the realized benefits of this eligibility and limit postsecondary access (Tuliao, 2017, Streitwieser et al., 2020, Loo, 2021, Kingston & Karakas, 2022, Casellas Connors et al., 2025).

This paper presents descriptive results from a mixed method study exploring newcomer students’ receipt of federal and state financial aid, participation in safety net programs, and their postsecondary outcomes. Using matched, longitudinal data from multiple Virginia state agencies, the results provide first of their kind insights into the rates at which newcomer students enrolled in postsecondary programs access financial aid and the safety net. Associations with a variety of factors hypothesized to be facilitators of access are presented, including age at time of arrival, country of origin, participation in ORR sponsored programming, and locale. 

Author

• Lindsay Dusard, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author