July 16, 2026

Summary

• Emergency aid receipt fell from 44% of students in Fall 2021 to 4% in Fall 2025, according to the Trellis Student Financial Wellness Survey, a decline of roughly 90 percent.
• While the number of institutions offering an emergency aid program has increased, most students do not know whether their college offers emergency aid. In nationally representative federal data, more than two-thirds of enrolled students did not know.
• Federal emergency aid worked and should be revived. The Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) directed nearly $40 billion to students, and recipients were more likely to stay enrolled and use aid for basic needs like food and housing.
• State-level emergency aid programs in seven states amount to roughly $46 million a year, or 0.1% of the now-expired federal investment.
• Congress can expand emergency aid at no cost by letting colleges award SEOG funds as emergency grants again, but SEOG itself faces a proposed 40% cut for FY 2027.

Emergency aid is one of the best tools in higher education for keeping students enrolled. Unlike traditional financial aid, which is packaged months before a term and disbursed at fixed time periods, emergency aid is designed to move quickly. This matters when more than half of students could not cover a $500 emergency with savings or credit. A modest grant, often a few hundred to a thousand dollars, can help a student cover an unexpected cost before it forces them to leave school.

Unexpected expenses are among the most common reasons students stop out. Decades of campus experience running emergency aid programs and a growing body of research have converged on the same conclusion: a timely grant at the right moment measurably improves the odds that a student stays enrolled and completes a degree or credential. Unfortunately, students’ ability to rely on this critical resource has collapsed.

44% →  4%

The number of students receiving emergency aid declined by roughly 90 percent between Fall 2021 and Fall 2025. Source: Trellis Student Financial Wellness Survey – Fall 2025 Results.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government built emergency aid at a scale higher education had never seen. The Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) directed nearly $40 billion in emergency grants to students, who used it for food, housing, transportation, healthcare, and other costs that otherwise pull people out of school, and the evidence that followed showed that it worked, as recipients of emergency grants proved more likely to stay enrolled. When that funding expired, states and institutions kept their own programs running, with a record number of campuses now operating an emergency aid program.

And yet students are receiving less help than before. New national data show that emergency aid receipt has collapsed even as the number of programs has multiplied. The question is not whether a program exists, but whether the students who need it can find it, qualify for it, and reach it in time.

Trellis Strategies documents the scale of that collapse in Emergency Aid in the Wake of the Pandemic and its five annual administrations of the Student Financial Wellness Survey. They find that the share of students reporting that they received emergency aid fell from 44% in Fall 2021, when HEERF dollars were still flowing, to just 4% in Fall 2025, a decline of roughly 90% in only four years. This is an alarming and rapid decline.

Source: Trellis Strategies, Student Financial Wellness Survey, including fall 2025 SFWS results, Q29. Data for this question were provided to the authors but have not been separately released. 

The pattern holds true for the 14 institutions that took part in all five years. Across the board, students are reporting less utilization of emergency aid.

Students are losing a critical resource to support their success. A car breaks down on the way to a final exam, a medical bill arrives the same week as rent, or a laptop fails in the middle of a term –for a student living close to the financial edge, any one of these can end a college career. The expense itself is often modest; what makes it destabilizing is the absence of savings, family support, or other financial buffers to absorb it. A small and timely grant can mean the difference between finishing the term and withdrawing altogether.

More Programs, Less Student Access

A State Patchwork Cannot Replace Scale

The most immediate cause of the collapse in student uptake, however, is that an infusion of federal money simply ran out. During the pandemic, Congress provided nearly $40 billion in emergency aid to students through HEERF ,which was left largely up to institutions to administer. Nearly 2,000 colleges voluntarily added about $1.7 billion in their own contributions to bolster the reach of that emergency aid. But by 2023, those funds were largely spent.

While some states and institutions have kept their emergency aid programs running, they've done so at a fundamentally smaller scale. A recent Hope Center summary of state-level emergency aid programs identifies just seven states with dedicated statewide programs.The largest of which, California's, was funded at $20 million in 2025 and targeted primarily at Dreamer students, with awards capped at $1,400 per student per year. Other state programs are considerably smaller. (Note: The Hope Center will be releasing further research on these state programs in the coming weeks). 

Taken together, these seven programs provide roughly $46 million a year. Compared with the nearly $40 billion that HEERF delivered to students across the CARES Act, Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSAA), and the American Rescue Plan Act between 2020 and 2023, the annual state total amounts to roughly 0.1% of that time-limited federal investment.

The state programs are nonetheless instructive in matters of design, demonstrating in practice what minimal eligibility restrictions, streamlined applications, broad allowable uses, and active outreach can look like. Washington's program eliminated supplementary documentation altogether. North Carolina allows students to describe the emergency in their own words. Good design, however, cannot substitute for adequate funding. Even in combination, these programs reach only a small fraction of the students HEERF served, and the underlying need has not eased.

Students Are Still in Crisis

The need that emergency aid was built to meet has not receded. Other findings from the Trellis Student Financial Wellness Survey describe a population under severe and widespread financial strain. Notably, more than half (54%) said they could not readily access $500 in cash or credit in an emergency—the key gap emergency aid was meant to fill. Nearly two-thirds (65%) say they ran out of money in the last year.

To absorb these financial shocks, students are increasingly turning to higher-risk financial tools. Nearly a quarter (23%) used “Buy Now, Pay Later” services, and more than half (55%) used a credit card during the year. An eye-popping 88% of students reported using their credit cards to pay for basic needs. Among credit-card users at two-year colleges, nearly half (47%) carried a balance from month to month, accumulating high-interest debt.

Other tools that financial aid offices have to respond to students’ emergencies can be complex to navigate or difficult to find. For example, the “professional judgment” (PJ) process allows students to receive adjustments to the data from their FAFSA (like reported income) or the cost of attendance, when it doesn’t reflect student needs or circumstances. Additional research by EdTrust noted that first-generation students and Black and Latino students are particularly likely to face challenges understanding and navigating the PJ process, and NASFAA leadership has echoed calls to make the appeals more transparent.

Financial strain falls most heavily on the students with the least economic resources. If students had ready access to emergency aid to fill gaps in their budgets and weather unexpected expenses, they’d be much less likely to rely on risky (and costly) forms of borrowing.

Financial Stress Is an Academic Problem

If we want students to attain a degree or other credential, we need to make sure they have the funds to do so. Among students who reported financial challenges while enrolled, nearly half (49%) of Trellis SFWS respondents said their situation made it difficult to concentrate on their coursework. 

The Hope Center's Student Basic Needs Survey reveals the same pattern: among those students who stopped out and later re-enrolled, 31% cited an unexpected expense or emergency as a reason for leaving, and 34% named insufficient money for living expenses. Across all students who had stopped out or were considering doing so, 79% attributed the decision to basic needs insecurity or financial pressure. Additional research from Trellis found that 41% of students who left college without completing a credential cited their financial situation as a primary reason for stopping out.

Evidence shows that emergency aid can prevent stop-outs. A study of roughly 47,000 students at Southern New Hampshire University who received HEERF emergency grants for basic needs found that recipients were 15.5% more likely to remain enrolled than non-recipients after the second round of funding, and 8.6% more likely to stay enrolled after the third round. At Western Governors University, emergency aid generated an estimated 11.2% increase in graduation. The grants did not erase long-term financial insecurity, but they kept a temporary crisis from becoming a permanent exit. 

The "OFA" Exclusion Amplifies Emergency Aid

Another reason emergency aid is so valuable: it is one of the only tools colleges have to respond to student needs that doesn’t create other challenges or problems for their financial aid package. Compared to awarding other grants, loans, or scholarships, it’s a simple intervention.

The FAFSA Simplification Act permanently excludes emergency aid from “Other Financial Assistance” (OFA)—the formal amount of non-federal aid a student is already getting that is calculated when institutions are awarding financial aid. Colleges can exclude emergency aid from OFA if the expense they’re using it for is not already included in the student’s cost of attendance. In practice, this means that an emergency grant can be given to students on top of their existing aid package without a dollar-for-dollar offset elsewhere. The school documents the request and the expense, and the aid reaches the student without clawing back what they already have, namely other state or institutional grants or scholarships.

With other forms of grants, or even certain gift cards, financial aid offices may need to recalculate OFA and pull back on other portions of a student’s aid package if they give them more aid, leaving students no better off than when they started. Emergency aid doesn’t have that problem. When SNAP benefits lapsed in fall 2025, some campuses provided grocery gift cards to help students afford to eat—but in many cases, emergency aid would have been the smarter and more flexible choice.

However, some students and staff have reported an overly cautious approach to using this flexibility, such as financial aid offices introducing their own complex definitions of “unexpected” or whether a cost is “associated with” an allowable cost of attendance component. Federal guidance is clear: colleges have full discretion to determine whether an unexpected expense is associated with a COA component and qualifies for the OFA exclusion. Simplicity is the best policy to ensure broad access for struggling students.

Who Gets Left Behind

A program that is weak or hard to find does not fail all students equally. The students hit hardest are those with the least room to absorb a shock, who are also the least likely to know that help exists. The BPS data offer the clearest example: among students experiencing homelessness, nearly two-thirds did not know whether their campus offered emergency aid.

Single parenting students are among the most financially exposed of all: 81% of single parents in the Trellis SFWS said they would struggle to find $500 for an emergency. Most relied on public assistance to get through the year.  Former foster youth and students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds carry a comparable burden. For a student with no family wealth, a single unexpected expense ceases to be a passing setback and becomes a decision about whether to remain enrolled.

The students most likely to be deterred by a confusing application, an onerous documentation requirement, or a fund they have never heard of are the very students a safety net is meant to catch. Reaching them demands an active program: outreach that precedes the crisis, multiple points of contact, minimal administrative burden, broad allowable uses, and money that moves quickly. Program design is a frontline decision that determines whether help reaches the people who need it most.

Designing Programs Students Can Use

Funding is the binding constraint, but the programs that survived HEERF also vary widely in how effectively they reach students. Much of that variation is a matter of design. Drawing on the same Trellis and BPS evidence documenting the collapse in students’ ability to access emergency aid, The Hope Center’s review of seven state programs distills a set of principles that apply as readily to a single campus fund as to a statewide program. We plan to publish further findings about these state emergency aid programs in the coming weeks.

We already know that every eligibility burden filters out some of the students least equipped to navigate institutional systems and most in need of help. Narrow restrictions tend to slow disbursement and confuse applicants without protecting much of value.

Visibility matters, because aid that students do not know about cannot help them, which is the central lesson of the awareness gap. Colleges should publicize emergency aid through orientation, financial aid communications, campus food pantries, course syllabi, and their own campus websites, and intensify their outreach during periods of higher economic anxiety—like natural disasters, issues with public benefit payments, or spiking gas prices.  

Because these reforms cost little to adopt, the issue is typically administrative capacity and a clear communication plan. Capacity and communication, however, are exactly what a resource-starved financial aid office struggles to supply. NASFAA has urged Congress to consider a dedicated federal emergency aid program and has suggested design principles to help overcome common barriers that prevent such programs from being effective.

The Stakes

For all the hardship these surveys record, students have not given up on higher education. Some 84% of respondents to the Fall 2025 SFWS said they believe a college degree will improve their quality of life, and they continue to enroll because they understand what is at stake. Institutions and policymakers should recognize that commitment by providing timely resources that students can reach and that help them cross the finish line.