| 来源类型 | Report |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| Pell Grant mission creep: How a federal program for low-income families expanded to the middle class | |
| Jason D. Delisle; Cody Christensen | |
| 发表日期 | 2019-07-11 |
| 出版年 | 2019 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Key Points The federal Pell Grant program was designed to help low-income students pay for college, but in recent years more middle-income students have become eligible. In 1995–96, a student from a three-person family earning $60,000 in today’s dollars was ineligible for a Pell Grant. Today, he or she would receive over $1,000. Pell Grant eligibility among middle-income students has increased because the effective income cutoff rises when lawmakers increase the maximum grant more quickly than inflation. Lawmakers could adopt a number of policies to prevent middle-income families from receiving grants, ensuring that future grant increases benefit only low-income students. Read the PDF. Executive Summary The federal Pell Grant was designed to help low-income students pay for college. But over the past two decades, a growing share of middle-income students have become eligible for the program. This was not policymakers’ explicit goal. The change appears to have happened inadvertently and gradually. Eligibility for a Pell Grant is primarily based on the size of the maximum grant that the program awards, and there is no absolute income cutoff. If lawmakers increase the maximum grant more quickly than inflation—which they have on average over long periods of time—then more middle-income families become eligible for grants. In 1995–96, a dependent student from a three-person family earning the equivalent of $60,000 today would not have qualified for a grant; today the student receives more than $1,000 through the program. This report examines how the program came to increasingly provide students from middle-income families with grants, particularly those earning between $50,000 and $60,000, focusing on changes that occurred between the 1995–96 and 2018–19 academic years. It concludes with recommendations for policymakers to improve the targeting of the Pell Grant program. Introduction The federal government has provided Pell Grants to low-income families to help pay for an undergraduate education since the 1970s. Today, the program disburses roughly $28 billion in aid to 6.6 million undergraduate students per year.1 The maximum grant that a student may receive in the 2018–19 academic year is $6,095, an amount that lawmakers set annually. A common talking point among advocacy organizations and lawmakers is that the purchasing power of a Pell Grant has failed to keep up with rising college prices.2 They point to the 1970s, early in the program’s history, when the maximum grant was enough to cover nearly 80 percent of the cost of attending a typical public four-year university. While lawmakers have routinely increased the grant, college tuition and living expenses have outpaced those increases. Today the maximum grant covers about 29 percent of college attendance costs, which advocates note is the lowest share in the program’s history.3 Many advocates call for restoring the value of the Pell Grant to cover the same share of college prices today as it did in the mid-1970s. They argue that this would help more low-income students attend college and reduce debt burdens. What they do not say is that such a change would also transform the Pell Grant program into a generous benefit for middle-income and even upper-income households. Eligibility is based on a sliding scale that incorporates the maximum grant size rather than on absolute income limits; as the maximum grant rises, students from families with incrementally higher incomes become eligible. For example, if lawmakers increased the maximum grant to $16,855, thereby restoring its purchasing power to 1970s levels based on college prices, many students from families earning $90,000 or more would qualify for grants.4 That would make the program unnecessarily and prohibitively costly because the funds flowing to those families would do nothing to advance college affordability for the low-income students who the program is supposed to assist. (Many advocates who support restoring the purchasing power also oppose implementing an income cap on eligibility.5) This scenario may seem theoretical—the chances that lawmakers triple the maximum grant in the near future are slim—but the effect it illustrates is already evident. Over the past 20 years, increases to the maximum Pell Grant have quietly and unintentionally caused the program to creep further into middle-income territory. In the mid-1990s, students from families earning the equivalent of $50,000 in today’s dollars typically would not qualify for Pell Grants. Today, these students can each expect to receive a $2,890 annual grant. This change occurred largely without any identifiable agenda to provide Pell Grants to families at these income levels. This report details how and why the Pell Grant program came to provide grants to families earning between $50,000 and $60,000 (which this report refers to as “middle-income”) and why the grants they receive have been increasing ever since. It covers the changes that occurred between the 1995–96 and 2018–19 academic years and focuses on years for which data from the quadrennial National Postsecondary Student Aid data set are available to provide supplementary statistics.6 We chose 1995–96 to start our analysis because it is the earliest year for which we could locate Department of Education worksheets to calculate a family’s Pell Grant eligibility.7 We conclude by providing several recommendations for policymakers who wish to increase program benefits while keeping those funds targeted to students from low-income families. Read the full report. Notes |
| 主题 | Higher Education |
| 标签 | education ; low-income ; Middle class ; students |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/pell-grant-mission-creep-how-a-federal-program-for-low-income-families-expanded-to-the-middle-class/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/206704 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Jason D. Delisle,Cody Christensen. Pell Grant mission creep: How a federal program for low-income families expanded to the middle class. 2019. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| Pell-Grant-Mission-C（6541KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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