The 20% Solution: Selective Colleges Can Afford to Admit More Pell Grant Recipients
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e 20% Solution: Selective Colleges Can Afford to Admit More Pell Grant Recipients By: Anthony P. Carnevale and Martin Van Der Werf May 2, 2017
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Transcript of The 20% Solution: Selective Colleges Can Afford to Admit More Pell Grant Recipients
The 20% Solution: Selective Colleges Can Afford to Admit More Pell Grant Recipients By: Anthony P. Carnevale and Martin Van Der Werf
May 2, 2017
Overview • There is a class divide in higher education.
• The Pell Grant was created as a solution to income inequality.
• A majority of Pell Grant recipients attend open-access colleges with low graduation rates (49%).
• Highly-qualified Pell Grant students are, for the most part, not attending selective colleges, which have much higher graduation rates (82%).
• The nation’s most elite universities could enroll more low-income students without significantly hurting their graduation rates or budgets.
• Requiring a minimum enrollment standard of 20 percent Pell Grant recipients could be a solution.
Who receives a Pell Grant? • A majority of Pell Grant recipients are women (62%)
Georgetown University Center on Educa5on and the Workforce analysis of data from Educa5onal Longitudinal Study of 2002, third followup (2012), and the NCES-‐Barron’s Admissions Compe55veness Index Data Files: 1972, 1982, 1992, 2004, 2008, 2014.
Who receives a Pell Grant? (cont.) • Nearly three-quarters of Pell
Grant recipients are from families making less than $30,000 per year.
• 67 percent of Pell Grant recipients attend public two-year and four-year colleges, and 18 percent attend for-profit colleges.
Georgetown University Center on Educa5on and the Workforce analysis of data from the Na5onal Center for Educa5on Sta5s5cs and the Na5onal Postsecondary Student Aid Study
Many qualified Pell Grant recipients do not attend selective colleges
Of the 150,000 Pell Grant recipients with SAT/ACT scores at or above the median on SAT (1120), more than half (86,000) do not attend selective universities.
Georgetown University Center on Educa5on and the Workforce analysis of data from Educa5onal Longitudinal Study of 2002, third follow-‐up (2012), and the NCES-‐Barron’s Admissions Compe55veness Index Data Files: 1972, 1982, 1992, 2004, 2008, 2014.
Pell Grant recipients graduate at higher rates at selective colleges than at open-access colleges
• Seventy-eight percent of Pell recipients who attend selective colleges graduate, compared to only 48 percent at open-access colleges.
Georgetown University Center on Educa5on and the Workforce analysis of restricted use Educa5onal Longitudinal Study data, 2002 (2012 update).
Private colleges tend to have the lowest number of Pell Grant recipients
• Sixty-nine of the 79 most selective colleges and universities that have less than 20 percent Pell Grant recipients are private.
• If every college was required to have at least 20 percent Pell Grant recipients, more than 72,000 more Pell students would have to be admitted to 346 colleges and universities.
• More than half of the Pell Grant recipients would be added to selective colleges.
Selective colleges can afford to admit more Pell Grant recipients
• Sixty-nine of the most selective private colleges ran average budget surpluses of $139 million over the last four years but admitted fewer than 20 percent Pell Grant recipients.
• To meet a threshold of 20 percent Pell Grant recipients, the selective colleges that would have to add the most Pell students are the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1,467) and Penn State University (1,357). The private selective universities that would have to add the most students are Boston University (1,046) and Washington University in St. Louis (975).
• A small number of highly-selective colleges have student bodies in which more than 20 percent are Pell Grant recipients, including Columbia University (21%) and the University of California at Berkeley (31%).
Conclusion • Mandating a certain percentage of Pell Grant recipients at all colleges could
equalize opportunity in higher education.
• The most selective colleges have the smallest proportion of low-income students. The median Pell Grant recipient enrollment is only 14 percent.
• Only 6 percent of the 5,500 colleges and universities in America would have to change their student mix to meet the 20 percent threshold.
For more information: See the full report at: cew.georgetown.edu/Pell20
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