The 1999-2000 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:2000) is a comprehensive nationwide study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to determine how students and their families pay for postsecondary education.¹ It also describes demographic and other characteristics of students enrolled. The study is based on a nationally representative sample of all students in postsecondary education institutions, including undergraduate, graduate, and first-professional students. For NPSAS:2000, information was obtained from more than 900 postsecondary institutions on approximately 50,000 undergraduate, 9,000 graduate, and 3,000 first-professional
students. They represented about 16.5 million undergraduates, 2.4 million graduate students, and 300,000 first-professional students who were enrolled at some time between July 1, 1999 and June 30, 2000.²