Wealthy Colleges Show Drop in Enrollments of Needy Students

By KARIN FISCHER

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Tables: How the Wealthiest Colleges Rate

Elite colleges have made headlines in recent years with financial-aid plans aimed at enrolling more low-income students. But despite those efforts, the proportion of financially needy undergraduates at the nation's wealthiest colleges and universities actually dropped between the 2004-5 and 2006-7 academic years, according to a Chronicle analysis of federal Pell Grant data.

Just 13.1 percent, on average, of the undergraduates at the country's 75 wealthiest private colleges in 2006-7 received Pell Grants, which are awarded to students from families with annual incomes of less than $40,000. Two years earlier, Pell Grant recipients made up 14.3 percent of the student body at these colleges, which have endowments of $500-million or more.

Likewise, the share of low-income students on the flagship campuses of the 39 best-endowed public universities dipped, from an average of 19.6 percent in 2004-5 to 18 percent two years later.

These declines come even as some 40 public and private institutions, most of which were included in The Chronicle's analysis, have made efforts to expand financial aid for low-income students and to more actively recruit them. At the same time, Congress has increased its scrutiny of the spending and student-aid policies of colleges with endowments that top $500-million.

Skeptics, however, have questioned whether revamping student-aid policy is enough to alter the composition of the student bodies at elite colleges. And advocates for low-income students point out that the country's changing demographics mean the financial need of college students is only growing.

Thomas G. Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, says he worries that selective colleges are becoming "class segregated."

"We have to ask if they're pulling their load" when it comes to enrolling needy students, he says.

Administrators at well-to-do colleges counter that such efforts take time. Just two new classes of students were admitted during the time period examined by The Chronicle, which first looked at the share of Pell Grant recipients at elite colleges in the 2004-5 academic year. Even if the two classes since then had far larger proportions of students with Pell Grants, the change to the overall student body would still be relatively modest.

What's more, says Robert M. Shireman, director of the nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success, it's important to look at the trend at wealthy colleges in the context of the college population as a whole. Between 2004-5 and 2006-7, the proportion of Pell Grant recipients at all public and private four-year institutions decreased about 7 percent, as the award's purchasing power stagnated and needy students turned to two-year and for-profit colleges.

Some Gains, Some Losses

That said, a few colleges surveyed had made small but real gains in the proportion of low-income students they enrolled, including Amherst, Holy Cross, and Williams Colleges; Princeton University; and the Universities of Richmond and Texas at Austin. (Other institutions increased the number of Pell Grant recipients but not as a proportion of their overall student bodies.)

Still other colleges continue to admit significant shares of students from modest means. Pell Grant recipients account for a quarter of the undergraduates at Florida State University and Smith College, for 35.2 percent at the University of California at Los Angeles, and for 77.4 percent at Berea College, which makes educating the neediest students its mission.

But dozens of institutions lost ground. The share of Pell Grant recipients at the California Institute of Technology dropped from 16.3 percent in 2004-5 to 11.3 percent in 2006-7. At the University of Delaware, the proportion fell from 9.8 percent to 7.3 percent.

Johnie A. Burton, Delaware's director of financial aid, calls 2006-7 an aberration, when the university enrolled both fewer Pell Grant recipients and fewer students over all.

To some researchers, Delaware's case underscores a problem with using Pell Grant data as a leading indicator of how well colleges are serving low-income students. Such once-a-year snapshots can be misleading, they say, and can also fail to capture the differences between institutions.

For example, universities with extensive adult-education programs or substantial numbers of foreign students, who are not eligible for Pell Grants, could have their numbers skewed downward because both often count in undergraduate enrollment totals. That's the case with Harvard University, which runs a large extension school.

Differences in reporting can also create confusion and make comparisons difficult. At Pennsylvania State University, for example, 14 percent of students on the flagship University Park campus received Pell Grants in 2006-7. But the university awards its grants centrally and calculates its Pell percentage as 21 percent of undergraduates across the multicampus system.

Sarah E. Turner, an associate professor of education and economics at the University of Virginia, notes that Pell eligibility tends to be far higher among nontraditional students than those dependent on their families for financial support. Institutions like the University of Cincinnati with large shares of nontraditional students will look much better using Pell ratios, even if they may not do a markedly better job of providing opportunities for recent high-school graduates, Ms. Turner says.

And some states, she notes, simply have larger numbers of high-achieving, financially needy students. In those cases, their Pell numbers may reflect demographics as much as institutional policy.

"Using one factor to determine how well a university serves low-income students is like trying to diagnose an illness by taking someone's temperature," says Stephen M. Farmer, assistant provost and director of undergraduate admissions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Pell, by itself, is not enough to make a diagnosis."

The 'I Can't Afford It' Battle

Still, Pell Grant numbers remain the more consistent, widely reported measure of the share of needy students at colleges. And even those who differ over methodology agree that low-income students continue to be underrepresented at elite institutions.

"No, we have not seen transformative change," Ms. Turner says. "It's not like, Well, we've solved this problem—on to poverty in Africa."

Although top colleges today are competing for high-achieving low-income students, Ms. Turner and others say that significantly expanding their numbers at these institutions will take time.

Princeton is a case in point. It was the first university to announce, in 2001, that it would eliminate loans for undergraduates and replace them with grants. That move did not lead to an immediate jump in the share of low-income students in Princeton's student body, says Robin A. Moscato, the university's director of undergraduate financial aid. Instead, their numbers increased incrementally, Ms. Moscato says, from 6.9 percent before the announcement to 10 percent in the current academic year.

"It takes time for the news to trickle through," she says.

Some experts argue that simply providing more money is not enough to attract needy students. "Colleges have to be more proactive than just implementing a financial-aid program and waiting for people to show up with application in hand," says Donald E. Heller, a professor of education at Pennsylvania State University at University Park.

Financial-aid directors say they are doing just that. The University of Virginia, for example, hired a social worker to walk low-income families through the student-aid process. Harvard has reached out to community activists to help recruit students in rural and inner-city neighborhoods. Amherst has had to build an addition to its admissions offices to house new staff members hired as part of its efforts to diversify its student body, says Thomas H. Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid.

Even so, Yvonne B. Hubbard, director of student financial services at Virginia, says recruiting needy students remains challenging, especially amid concerns that a credit crunch could make student loans harder to get.

"We're still fighting the 'I can't afford it' battle," Ms. Hubbard says. "For some of these kids, applying to a place like UVa is like taking a leap of faith."