A bitter Pell: some universities could be doing a much better job enrolling and graduating low-income students.

• Author: Voight, Mamie
• Position: Pell Grant recipients

Higher education is a crucial pathway to social and economic mobility at a time when income inequality has reached record levels. Yet many of the public universities that should be helping students move forward are instead holding them back by failing to enroll enough low-income undergraduates. As a result, tens of thousands of young people are missing the first, critical step toward opportunity.

Which institutions could be doing a better job of enrolling and graduating more low-income students? The answer to that question, it turns out, can be derived from data in the Washington Monthly's own rankings. Those rankings include a "predicted Pell enrollment rate" measure. This statistic compares the percentage of students enrolled at a given college who receive a federal Pell Grant to the percentage who would be statistically expected to enroll, given the college's selectivity. Importantly, this calculation does not suggest that every selective college must enroll huge proportions of low-income students--only as many as other, academically similar colleges have already enrolled. We took that predicted Pell enrollment rate for each institution, compared it to the institution's actual Pell enrollment rate, and applied the college's graduation rate. This allowed us to estimate how many additional Pell students a particular college could graduate without changing its admissions standards--in other words, the college's "fair share" of qualified, low-income students.

Table 1 shows the ten universities with the largest potential to graduate far more Pell recipients, based on this measure. For example, Pennsylvania State University's main campus alone graduates about 930 fewer low-income students every year than our formula suggests it could. The University of Delaware, Indiana University-Bloomington, the University of Alabama, and Purdue University each have shortfalls of more than 400 low-income students.

By opening their doors to more low-income students who qualify academically, these colleges with Pell enrollment deficits could make a significant dent in helping the 240,000 high-achieving, low-income students who, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, do not graduate from college each year. This finding holds even though some low-income students would enroll and graduate elsewhere. Studies show that similarly qualified low-income students are much more likely to graduate from a selective college than from an open-access institution.

Why, then, are...