Too Far For Comfort: The Gap Between Postsecondary Students’ Financial Well-Being And Help-Seeking

This brief examines data from 45,624 students at 104 higher education institutions that participated in Trellis’ Fall 2021 Student Financial Wellness Survey (SFWS) with a focus on students’ comfort discussing their financial situations with others and students’ monetary discussions with financial aid advisors. We find that although many students reported feeling comfortable discussing their financial situations with financial professionals hired by their schools (64 percent), most students (62 percent) did not actually seek the help they purported to value.