This research examines the short term success of a postsecondary federal financial aid program, the SMART Grant, designed to increase this stock of scientific human capital. An exploration of the success of this program provides the opportunity to address two critically important research questions. Do financial incentives encourage students to major in science? Does additional grant aid improve undergraduate persist at four-year colleges? By exploiting the GPA and Pell eligibility cutoffs to receive a SMART Grant, this paper employs a regression discontinuity analysis to answer both questions.