Financial aid is becoming more popular among students. According to finaid.org financial aid applications have been increasing at a rate of 4.7 percent every year since 1997. With financial aid this popular, it makes people wonder, are students really using it for school and books? Or is it being used to buy alcohol or for recreational purposes?

Students turned in 1.2 million more applications in 2011 than in the preceding school year, that’s 17.5 percent. From this data it is obvious that since the recession began in 2008 students have been having a hard time paying for school. Some students might take advantage of the system to pay for extracurricular activities or other areas that are not exactly “educational”.

Some might argue that financial aid for students should be used only for things that might effect their education and if they need more money they should get a job. Thinking this way might help so that a student could buy a laptop or tablet, but they wouldn’t be able to buy food or even pay their own rent.

Some students who are taking on a full course load don’t have the time to work, however, in these cases students should be allowed to use their financial aid money for food, clothes and shelter. After all, according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, these are the most basic desires every person has, any psychology student should know this.

Financial aid is traditionally used to cover the cost of college, but according to the College Board tuition and fees cost $8,655 for students at public colleges alone last year. That doesn’t include the cost of housing, meals, school supplies, and textbooks. And we all know how high textbook prices can be.

With financial aid being as available as it is in the internet driven age we live in now, there is no reason students shouldn’t be able to spend financial aid on other things other than tuition and fees. It’s even alright for a student to spend it on something nice to reward themselves for good grades every once in a while. It’s when they use it for partying every weekend and need to take out student loans and ask for more financial aid because they spent all their money on parties that a line needs to be drawn.

According to stateuniversity.com, students spend an average of $50 a month on beer alone. American college students spent a total of $5.5 billion on alcohol each year. That’s a lot of booze.

There are even cases where students spend their financial aid on clothes and then they have no help with school because they have no money. They spend their money thinking it can’t run out and when it does they get scared and try to figure out what to do about it.

So when spending financial aid, make sure everything is necessary; if not, spend your own money on it. Don’t use somebody else’s.