Pell recipients often tend to be first generation students, but not all first generation students are Pell recipients. When looking at low-income students who are first generation, a report by the The Pell Institute titled “Moving Beyond Access” provides the statistics of students who are both low income and first generation.

The report shows that demographically, low-income, first-generation students are more likely than their peers to be older; female; have a disability; come from a minority background; be a non-native English speaker; to have been born outside of the U.S.; have dependent children; are single parents; have earned a high school equivalency diploma; and are financially independent from their parents.

That means that low-income students have significant struggles that are even more magnified if they happen to be first generation. Our research team interviewed a series of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Watch them here.

In the Atlantic article titled, “What Happens to Pell Grant Recipients After They Enroll?” director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute, Andrew Kelly states, “It’s kind of astounding when you think about how much money is spent on the Pell grant program...we don’t have any idea about how much of that money goes to producing degrees. We don’t know what happens to Pell recipients after they enroll.”

According to NBC, Pell Grants, grants that low-income students who meet certain criteria receive, are actually funded by over 3.1 billion taxpayer dollars each year. There is a financial investment that citizens of the U.S. are making to assist low-income students, but information about how Pell recipients are doing is limited.

Although The Hechinger Report states that laws require colleges to report data on graduation rates to prospective students who request information, colleges don’t have to give the same data they give to applicants to the U.S. government.

In response, the Department of Education created the National Student Loan Database System, or NSLDS. The database allows students to view grants and loans of students over the span of four, five, or six years. Since the database’s main purpose is to track loans, students who receive Pell grants but who do not take out other loans are not accounted for by the system. The NSLDS system also does not measure graduation rates of the students who take out different loans or grants.

In the beginning of 2014, Congress gave the Department of Education 120 days to measure Pell grant graduation rates for every university and college in the country. However, the data arrived more than a year late. In November of 2015, information on the graduation rates of Pell recipients were finally available, but there was a number of issues with reporting methods.

According to an article from PBS Newshour titled Billions in Pell Grants go to students who never graduate, “It did not break down the information of the institution, citing problems with the data, and was only able to analyze 70 percent of Pell recipients.”

The little data that is available paints a bleak picture. Still, “only 39 percent of the 1.7 million students in its sample earned a bachelor’s degree in six years”.