What is the Pell Grant Worth?

The Pell Grant got its start as the Basic Education Opportunity Grant, or BEOG sometime in the 1970's; it was later named for Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell. The idea was simple: To provide a basic level of financial support for students from low income families who aspired to go to college.

It's almost certainly had a lot to do with increased levels of educational attainment in America, but rapid tuition increases, coupled with lower increases for the Pell, means the gap between Pell and tuition has gotten bigger over time.

The College Board has complied a lot of good data on this and other financial aid trends in its report, updated annually, on its Higher Education Trends site, where you can download the data. Unfortunately, the data looks like this when you get it. Maybe you can extract the insight; I can't.

So I pulled it into Tableau and spent an hour or so with it to see what I could find. It's below. The College Board has calculated enrollment-weighted average tuition by type (4-year public and 4-year private, not-for-profit) which makes comparisons easier, and has adjusted everything (including the maximum Pell Grant) for inflation. You can see on the three views what's happened to tuition, fees, and Pell; how much they've changed on a percentage basis; and the purchasing power of Pell over time.

Occasionally (OK, frequently) I've criticized highly selective institutions for enrolling very low percentages of Pell Grant students in their freshman class. If you wanted to argue that they don't make much business sense, you might have a point. But you'd also be right in pointing out that the diminished purchasing power of Pell is due in large part to rapid increases in tuition. So there's plenty of blame to go around.

What else do you see?

Pell Grants and Purchasing Power Over Time

Learn About Tableau

Comments

Changes in AP Scores, 2022 to 2024

Used to be, with a little work, you could download very detailed data on AP results from the College Board website: For every state, and for every course, you could see performance by ethnicity. And, if you wanted to dig really deep, you could break out details by private and public schools, and by grade level. I used to publish the data every couple of years. Those days are gone. The transparency The College Board touts as a value seems to have its limits, and I understand this to some extent: Racists loved to twist the data using single-factor analysis, and that's not good for a company who is trying to make business inroads with under-represented communities as they cloak their pursuit of revenue as an altruistic push toward access. They still publish data, but as I wrote about in my last post , it's far less detailed; what's more, what is easily accessible is fairly sterile, and what's more detailed seems to be structured in a way that suggests the company doesn...

The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be. His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges." As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office. The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look: The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl...

Changes in SAT Scores after Test-optional

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report. It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so. One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it. In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog