Every year, the U.S. Department of Education selects hundreds of thousands of low-income students to provide additional documentation to corroborate their financial aid eligibility in a process known as verification. Although many are concerned about the potential deleterious effects of being selected, to date, studies are limited to descriptive analyses. To fill this gap in the literature, we use population-level, multicohort data to estimate the effects of financial aid verification on initial college enrollment for recent high school graduates in Tennessee. An entropy balance weighting approach indicates that students selected for verification are 3.8 percentage points (4.9%) less likely to enroll in college with underserved populations and late Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) filers most negatively affected.

每年，美国教育部都会挑选成千上万的低收入学生提供额外的文件，以证实他们的经济援助资格，这一过程称为验证。尽管许多人担心被选择的潜在有害影响，但迄今为止，研究仅限于描述性分析。为了填补文献中的空白，我们使用人口水平的多队列数据来估计经济援助验证对田纳西州最近的高中毕业生的初始大学入学的影响。熵平衡权重方法表明，被选中进行验证的学生，入学率较低的人群和较晚受到不利影响的联邦学生援助（FAFSA）申请者免费入学的可能性降低了3.8个百分点（4.9％）。