In order to give low-income students a better shot at graduation and to bring about more socioeconomic diversity on campus, the nation’s most selective colleges should make sure at least 20 percent of their students are Pell Grant recipients, a new paper being released today from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce argues.
Billed as “The 20 Percent Solution,” the paper states that selective colleges and universities can increase the percentage of their Pell Grant students to 20 percent — roughly half the rate of the 39 percent of students overall who receive Pell Grants — and that it won’t hurt their graduation rates or their bottom lines.
“Just because most Pell Grant recipients are low-income does not mean they would not succeed in college,” the paper states, refuting what it cites as a common refrain among selective institutions.
“There are more than enough highly qualified Pell students — those who score above the median test score for students at selective colleges (1120 or higher on the SAT/ACT scale) — to fill all those seats at the affected selective institutions with no resulting decline in graduation rates.”
The Georgetown analysis found that there are 346 colleges and universities that fall short of the 20 percent Pell enrollment threshold, and that more than half of the Pell Grant recipient shortfall is concentrated among the nation’s top 500 most selective institutions, even though they only enroll about 25 percent of all undergraduates.
“For all of them to attain the 20-percent threshold, some 72,000 additional Pell Grant recipients would have to attend those colleges,” the paper states of the 346 institutions with fewer than 20 percent Pell Grant recipients.
Research has shown that low-income students generally graduate at rates similar to their peers, thus, the paper argues, they would do better at selective institutions where the graduation rates are higher.
