MESA project

The Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid Project, or the MESA Project, was a four-year research effort conducted by CanEd staff and the School for Policy Studies at Queen's University on behalf of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. The purpose of the project was to evaluate the impact of access bursaries given to low-income first-year students across Canada and to answer the following questions about access and persistence to PSE in Canada:

1. Who are the low-income teenagers that decide to pursue PSE and how do they compare to low-income teenagers that decided not to pursue PSE?
2. Does providing more funding in the early years of PSE serve to attract more students from low-income families into PSE?
3. Does providing more funding in the early years of PSE contribute to increased persistence rates among low-income students?
4. Are there regional differences among students from low-income families across Canada?

The research is now completed, and CanEd will be releasing the research findings and reports shortly. For more information on MESA, go to the MESA website at: www.mesa-project.org.