There’s a lot support for the Pell Grant program as a way to make college more affordable to the student. Taxpayers, of course, are footing the bill for the grants. Now President Obama is proposing to increase funding for Pell Grants. That stream meant $124 million to 26,500 students/schools in the Triangle during the 2010-2011 year, according to the Triangle Business Journal.
In his proposed budget, Obama asks Congress to increase the maximum Pell Grant by $140, to $5,785, and spend $8 billion on job-training programs at community colleges, according to Chronicle of Higher Education.
So how accountable should a student be for the money invested by society into his/her education? The grants don’t have to be paid back. And as we learned in this report from Jenna Ashley Robinson at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, only half of recipients graduate in six years. And, as with many government programs, eligibility requirements have widened, which means that students from families with incomes of $60,000 — well into the middle class — qualify for this grant. I spoke with Robinson about the Pell Grant program last fall. Here’s a portion of our discussion.
Robinson: Once you get a Pell grant, you do not have to pay it back. The accountability comes in at the end of every school year. So students do have to maintain — I think it’s a C average — and stay in school in order to qualify for a grant the next year. And they do have to be working toward a degree program. But on the way in, there’s very little accountability. All you have to do to get that first Pell grant is to be a high school graduate and to go to an accredited university in a degree program.
Martinez: And fill out the application and you’re good to go.
Robinson: Right. Absolutely.
Martinez: Are recipients required to finish a degree or to graduate from college?
Robinson: They’re not, and, actually, that’s part of the problem because only about 51 percent of Pell recipients do graduate after six years.
Martinez: You’ve given us the data, but what does that data mean? In other words, why did you decide you wanted to look at the program? It’s been going on for decades.
Robinson: Well, a lot of the growth has happened very recently because of changes in those eligibility standards. So we wanted to find out: why has this growth been happening, and what can we do to notch it back a little bit, especially given the large deficits that the federal government has?
And so we came up with a few ideas of how to correct the problem, including limiting Pell grants only to students who actually come from low-income families — students in the bottom income quartile — and introducing some kind of academic component to getting the Pell grant in the first place. As I said, right now all you have to do is graduate from high school. We think it would be better if students had to have a minimum SAT score of about 850 out of 1600 and a minimum GPA of 2.5 before they get a Pell grant in the first place. We think that would encourage students not only to start school but to finish school.
Rather than simply proposing to give out more money, a more prudent course is to reform the program and ensure that its original mission — to help low-income students – is the focus.
