What the Pell is Going On: 2023-24 Pell Shares

What is a Pell Share and Why Do We Care?

The Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) has recently published enrollment numbers for Pell-eligible students for academic year 2023-24. The federal government’s Pell Grant program provides up to $7,395 per year for undergraduates with financial need. Students who receive Pell Grants do not need to pay them back. 

Since most Pell Grants go to students from low-income households (see chart below), many researchers and policy advocates use the enrollment of Pell-eligible students as a proxy indicating a college’s or university’s commitment to educating all students, regardless of need. It’s an imperfect measure, but Pell enrollment gives us a pretty good picture of who a college serves and, indirectly, what its priorities are.

Source

A Decade of Challenge and Change

Here at Class Action we wanted to look at this data to get a sense of how enrollment patterns have changed over the past decade, during which college access became a much larger topic on elite college campuses, thanks in large part to a 2017 package in the New York Times covering research from the economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and other economists, who had unprecedented access to tax data for millions of Americans, including where they went to college. Their “Mobility Report Cards” appalled people when they revealed that at some highly selective colleges there were more students from the top one percent of the income distribution than there were from the bottom sixty percent. 

It’s important to note that the data in that groundbreaking and oft-cited paper was for the cohort of students who graduated college in 2013 and, thus started in the range of 2007 to 2009. In other words, the data is kind of old and needs refreshing. Until Chetty and Friedman do an update, we can use Pell shares as a proxy. The outcomes are revealing even if we only look at what happened with the ten worst colleges in the study.

Publicizing Pell shares and other data about socioeconomic diversity and opportunity in higher education can work as a prod to better action, assuming that an institution is capable of embarrassment. Some of the institutions highlighted in the Times coverage put in serious work to change their mission and increase access to their campus. Washington University increased its Pell share 244% over the past decade. Colby College’s current Pell share isn’t spectacular, but it’s 66% higher than it was a decade ago. Others from that list of the ten most terrible schools for access, such as Colorado College, Colgate University, and Tufts University (whose Pell share appears to be fixed at 11.4%), have done little to improve or even fallen backward after making improvements.

The Big Picture

The share of first-year students with Pell Grants enrolled in two and four-year colleges decreased by about 45,000 people or three percentage points between 2013 and 2023. This drop is not as concerning as it might first seem. 

First of all, that share probably has already gone up. Pell eligibility was expanded significantly in 2024 and FAFSA completion has risen, so we can expect the numbers and shares to increase in 2024, even with all the difficulty that cohort faced with the launch of the FAFSA that year. The Department of Education also reported that about half a million more students and three percent more high school seniors received Pell Grants in 2024-25 than did in 2023-24. Last year, some highly selective institutions were already touting increases, including Georgetown University, which had a large drop in its Pell Share from 2013 to 2023.

Second of all, many of the largest drops in Pell enrollment and Pell shares between 2013 and 2023 took place at community colleges and for-profit institutions. Those drops are as much about 2013 as they are about 2023. Thanks in large part to the Great Recession, enrollment in community colleges was at an all-time high in the early Twenty-teens, and for-profit colleges were also still doing very well before regulations helped shrink that sector. In some respects, smaller Pell enrollment numbers and enrollment shares overall might be signs of a healthier economy (fewer community college students likely indicates a stronger labor market–that’s good!) and a healthier higher education ecosystem (fewer for-profit colleges is also good!).

If you look at just four-year colleges, the declines in Pell enrollments and shares are much smaller, although the seven percentage point drop at Florida’s public universities might be a source of concern. That represents about 1,100 fewer freshmen with Pell Grants at research universities that have some of the best graduation rates in the nation for low-income students. Florida’s public university system has long been a beacon of affordability, access, and strong outcomes for students from low-income households. It would be a real betrayal of the state’s responsibility toward Florida’s high school graduates if we see a prolonged slide in first-year Pell enrollment in the state’s universities. Florida should be looking to Texas’s example.

Elite Colleges and Universities

There is good news at many elite private colleges and universities, where there have been improvements in Pell shares. This good news needs to be tempered with a recognition that even after a decade or so of efforts to increase access at these wealthy institutions, the number and share of students they enroll from low-income households is much smaller than what is merely average at most four-year colleges. Ivy League institutions and the liberal arts colleges in the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) have improved, but they still trail California public universities’ Pell share by 26 percentage points. All 19 of these heavily endowed colleges enrolled 513 fewer Pell-eligible freshmen together than Arizona State University did all by itself in 2023, despite being more than $200 billion wealthier collectively than ASU.

Elite colleges and universities have a long way to go when it comes to enrolling their fair share of Pell-eligible students, especially at these 48 colleges with acceptance rates below 33% and Pell shares that are 17.5% or lower, which is half the Pell share for all four-year colleges.

There are, however, some highly selective institutions where a quarter or more of their first-year students receive Pell Grants. Most of them are public, although Berea College is a private institution that shows that there is a whole other way for a college to achieve prestige, a way that does not require enrolling the most students from independent high schools possible.

Once again, any praise should be moderated by the fact that the Pell shares at highly selective public universities were down overall from where they were a decade ago. The declining Pell share at some of the University of California schools, for instance, should lead the UC Regents to consider the degree to which increasing selectivity is coming at a cost to low-income students. 

Class Action is organizing students across these campuses to challenge their institutions' failure to achieve socioeconomic diversity and live up to their public obligations. If you're ready to change your campus for the better, reach out to us here.

Search the Data

We’re making the latest Pell enrollment shares for first-time, full time students (i.e., freshmen) more readily available in the table at the bottom of this post and comparing them to institutions’ Pell shares from five and ten years earlier in the hope that these data might nudge some institutions to do better, but also to provide a larger picture of the current state of higher education’s social contract with America, which should require institutions that benefit handsomely from public financial support to enroll classes more representative of that public.

This analysis focuses on freshmen because looking at changing shares for a newly enrolled class allows us to track institutions' priorities more rapidly than if we looked at all undergrads.  We’ve also focused on two- and four-year institutions, although some of the institutions included in our data set of nearly 2,700 institutions are identified by the Department of Education’s College Scorecard as predominantly certificate granting institutions. We only included institutions with at least fifty first-year, full-time students because tracking Pell shares at tiny institutions is not very insightful since very small changes, like the loss of one Pell-eligible student at a school with just 7 students, can look very large with respect to changes in percentages.