IHEP: Well-Known, Selective Universities Fall Short on Serving Low-Income Students
By Allie Bidwell, Communications Staff
Some of the more selective colleges and universities with higher student outcomes could be doing more to enroll and graduate low-income students, according to a new report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, released Thursday.
The report – co-authored by Mamie Voight, IHEP’s director of policy and research, and Colleen Campbell, senior policy analyst at the Association of Community College Trustees – examined the proportion of Pell Grant recipients different institutions enroll relative to their size, and measured the potential each school has to enroll such students based on the Pell recipient enrollment at academically similar schools.
Voight and Campbell found that the schools with the greatest potential to enroll and graduate more Pell Grant recipients tended to be “large public universities with high graduation rates, large overall enrollments, and few Pell Grant recipients relative to their size.” That’s not to say those schools don’t enroll a large number of Pell Grant recipients – they just don’t enroll as many as they could, the report found.
“Selective institutions are lauded as being ‘the best’ in the nation, but often, they could be doing more to serve our nation’s most vulnerable students,” the report said. “Increasing access is possible, but the effort must be intentional.”
The top potential contributors identified in the report are fairly well-known institutions, including Pennsylvania State University, the University of Delaware, Indiana University–Bloomington, the University of Alabama, Purdue University, James Madison University, Virginia Polytechnic University, Towson University, and Texas Tech University.
The authors point out that if all of the 820 four-year institutions identified as underperformers increased their enrollment of Pell recipients to match the predicted rate, as many as 57,500 additional Pell recipients could graduate each year.
Some of the institutions IHEP said could be serving more Pell recipients said there are often obstacles that prevent them from doing so, including gaps in college readiness, budget constraints, and high nonresident enrollment, among other issues.
But Voight and Campbell also found institutions that managed to increase their Pell recipient enrollments while keeping their student outcomes intact. The University of California–Santa Cruz, for example, more than doubled its Pell recipient enrollment between 2008 and 2013
The report also highlighted methods used by higher performing schools to help solve the undermatching problem at institutions that could enroll more Pell recipients, such as targeted admissions and outreach efforts, and community partnerships.
“Many of the colleges we highlight in our report prove that through strong leadership and deliberate recruitment, it is possible to increase the number of low-income students enrolled, and help them succeed on their paths to graduation,” said IHEP President Michelle Asha Cooper, in a statement.
Publication Date: 10/29/2015
Helen F | 10/30/2015 7:6:37 PM
As a proud UCSC grad, I can't resist: go Slugs!
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