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, 10,600 graduate, and 1,200 first-professional students. About 8,000 graduate students and 900 first-professional students were interviewed. The NPSAS sample 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. The response rate for obtaining institutional record data for all students was 97 percent and the weighted overall student interview response rate was 65.6 percent.²