Disparities in Statistics
The average cost of attendance for a public four-year college in the 2015-16 academic year is $16,651 and for a private four-year college it is $32,405. The cost of attending colleges and universities has gone up almost 71 percent in the past decade, making it harder and harder for low-income families -- and even middle-class families -- to send their children to an institution of higher education. In the meantime, the government has set certain programs in place to help assist students and families in getting though higher education. Solutions to this issue have become a crucial point of debate for the 2016 elections, seeing that so many students are dissatisfied with the average cost of attendance of universities
The Pell Grant program was designed to give financial aid to low-income students who seek out higher education. They are awarded only to undergraduate students who have not earned bachelor's or professional degree. These awards depend on a student's financial aid, their cost of attendance, whether a student is a part-time student of a full-time student, and if a student plans to attend school for a full academic year or less.
The maximum award for the 2015-2016 academic year is $5,5775.
But, where does the money to support these Pell grants come from? Taxpayer dollars. The Pell Grant Award Program is the federal government's largest education expenditure and costs US taxpayers $31.4 billion per year.
Historically, information on the graduation and success of Pell Grant recipients have not been published, and, therefore, taxpayers have been left in the dark about where their money is going, and whether or not their taxes are being put to good use. In 2015 the department of education released college-by-college graduation rates for low-income students for the first time.
The most accurate of the data released came from a non-profit advocacy group called The Education Trust. Their study, however, only focused on four-year, public and private non-profit institutions who were not Carnegie specialized institutions (schools of art, music, design, health profession schools, etc.) and who had the most recent graduation rates, according to Andrew Nichols, Director of Higher Education Research & Data Analytics.
”We were founded for one reason, and one reason alone: to push, prod, and cajole our country towards educational justice.” - The Education Trust mission statement
This is only 1,149 out of the 5,582 schools that award Pell grants which means that data on graduation rates for Pell grant students is only really represented by 20.58 percent of the institutions in which taxpayer dollars were invested. For-profit schools and two-year public and private institutions were also not considered in the study.
This is most likely because there is a loophole that protects for-profit institutions from reporting their graduation rates to the government.
According to The Education Trust, they decided to exclude all for-profit institutes for two reasons. The first being because they could think of no way to persuade for-profit institutions of actually giving the information graduation rates "given their subpar track record on student success." The second reason is that for-profit enrollment is declining.
All this adds up to is the fact that there is no accurate representation the success of Pell grant recipients. Even the study done by The Education Trust admits that their information is not accurate because they acquired it from two different data sources. Also, when looking The Education Trust’s data set 357 schools said that they did not collect Pell Grant data. 82.6 percent of the schools that did not collect Pell Grant data were Private Non-Profit institutions. It is safe to assume that there might be some percentage discrepancies with this article as well because there is no clear information as to how the low-income students of this country are doing.
Total awards granted per state
The Heichinger Report also tried to create an analysis of Pell Grant graduation rate data by creating a cross section of colleges and universities and found that billions of taxpayer dollars of the taxpayer-funded Pell Grants nationwide go to students who never earn degrees. They also note that their information may not be accurate and also claim that this information was not publicly reported anywhere else.
When contacting the publication and asking where to find the information they based their report on, they suggested using the study done by The Education Trust. It is interesting to note that when searching for Pell Grant graduation statics, most of the top sources are referenced to either the articles done by The Heichinger Report, The Education Trust or College Board. What all of these things have in common is that none of them are linked to the government in any way. The government is not conducting accurate enough research on a subject that is fully funded by them.
Getting a clear percentage on higher education graduation rates as a whole is complicated for many reasons. For example, people come and go from college all the time; they take their time getting through their credits, or they finish early. This makes finding a clear percentage of how many people having completed college have to consider a number variables. But, the fact that there are many institutions who are not obligated to report any data on their school's success rates means that taxpayers are not getting a clear picture as to if their money is being put to good use or not.
Taking into account the data that exists, the national average of 6-year Pell grant recipients graduation rate among peers is approximately 52.8 percent [1]. This might look like an alarming number, but in comparison to the graduation of non-Pell students, there is only an average of a 5.7 percent gap between graduation rates. This is an average that comes from a very wide spectrum of gaps and rates. Some universities have almost no difference between non-Pell grant students and students receiving Pell grants, but others have a gap that goes over nine percentage points.
When looking at graduation rates specifically of low-income or high-income students, the gap seems to be much larger. All Pell Grant recipients are low-income students, but not all low-income students receive Pell Grants. This means that according to the data that exists, there may be a correlation between the success rate of low-income students who receive Pell Grants and those who do not.
When looking at graduation rates specifically for New York State, 116 universities provided data, including Ithaca College. The state average completion rate for 6-year Pell grant recipients was 52 percent The average for non-Pell Grant students was approximately 57.6 percent.
At Ithaca College, the graduation rate gap between Pell Students and Non-Pell students is 8.5 percent. Pell Grants students had a graduations rate of 68.7 percent and Non-Pell students had a graduation rate of 77.2 percent. Comparatively with other schools in the state, it is one of the higher gaps between students who are a part of the Pell Grant Program and those who are not.
At the end of the day, taxpayer dollars are funding a system that does not guarantee the degree completion of any of their students. Be it if their money is being invested in Pell Grants, or state schools or federal financial aid. There is no clear interpretation or information that would accurately map out the success rates of Pell-Grant students either, since conclusions are drawn from small, and very specific sectors/representations of the higher education spectrum as a whole.
[1] This percentage was calculated by taking the average of Pell Grant recipients among peers of the schools who reported their information to The Education Trust and fining and average between those percentages.