The Dangerous Economist: Many Colleges Fail in Push to Boost Enrollment of Lower-Income Students

Monday, September 26, 2022

Many Colleges Fail in Push to Boost Enrollment of Lower-Income Students

Dozens of top schools are losing ground on goal of enrolling 50,000 additional students by 2025

By Melissa Korn of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Dozens of the nation’s top universities are falling short on their goals to enroll more lower-income students—and many are actually losing ground, despite major investments in financial aid, recruiting and academic support, according to a recent report detailing enrollment trends.
More than 125 colleges, including all eight members of the Ivy League, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin, have signed on to the American Talent Initiative, a campaign established in 2016 that aims to increase by 50,000 the number of lower-income students who enroll at high-performing schools by 2025.
They added just 7,713 such students between 2015 and 2021, the initiative’s progress report found, with early gains partly wiped out during the Covid-19 pandemic, when overall enrollment declined nationwide.
In the 2021-22 school year, the 127 schools that provided data for the report enrolled 292,367 undergraduates who received federal need-based Pell Grants, which serve as a common proxy to measure lower-income student enrollment. That was down by about 500 from the prior year, and off the 2018 peak of 299,084."

Here are some earlier posts on related topics:

Does It Pay To Go To College? (2009)

Maybe That College Degree Is Not As Valuable As You Thought (2010)

As college costs rise, sticker shock eased by student aid (2010)

Is It Getting Too Expensive To Go College? (2011)

Is College Still A Good Investment? (2012)

What College Majors Pay The Highest? (2013)

For Some Grads, College Isn't Worth Debt (2014)

Student loan delinquency is higher than for other borrowing (2015)

50 College Majors With the Best Return on Investment (2015)

Who Is Most Likely To Default On Their Student Loans? (2016)

The Diminishing Returns of a College Degree: In the mid-1970s, far less than 1% of taxi drivers were graduates. By 2010 more than 15% were (2017)

The Diminishing Returns of a College Degree (2017)

Student-Debt Forgiveness Is a Wonderful Boon, Until the IRS Comes Calling: Education analysts, student advocates warn of impending crisis from one-time tax bills individuals may not be prepared to pay off (2018)

Is the U.S. student loan system broken? (2019)