As presidential candidates tout their plans to make college more accessible and affordable (even “free”), new findings reveal that billions of dollars in grants may be squandered on students who never finish college.
The Pell grant program is aimed at students who cannot afford to attend college. Unlike the case with college loans, Pell grants are not repaid.
Although Pell grants cost taxpayers $31.4 billion in the 2015 fiscal year, the government does not keep track of the graduation rates for students who receive Pell grants. This means the government has no way of monitoring whether the Pell grant program is successful in helping students who will earn diplomas.
The Hechinger Report asked the country’s 50 largest public and 50 largest private colleges and universities to provide data regarding Pell grants. Hechinger requested the percentage of full-time students receiving Pell grants, the six-year graduation rate for Pell grant recipients, and the six-year graduation rate for all students.
Hechinger found that among the 82 schools that responded, “more than a third of Pell recipients at those schools hadn’t earned degrees even after six years.”
“Of those schools that did respond, the average six-year graduation rate for all students was 70 percent, higher than the national average of 59 percent. For Pell grant recipients, the graduation rate was 66 percent. The more Pell students an institution enrolls, these statistics show, the lower their likelihood of graduating,” Sarah Butrymowicz, the author of the study, noted.
Although Pell grant recipients graduated at higher rates than their peers at 15 of the schools, only nine of the schools had differences greater than one percent.
“The graduation rate alone isn’t enough to know how much federal Pell money is going to students who don’t earn degrees,” Butrymowicz wrote. “Calculating that would require knowing the award amounts and how long a student was enrolled before dropping out.”
Richard Vedder, the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, told NBC News, “There's two scandals here. We have spent over the last decade one quarter of a trillion dollars on Pell grants, and if you ask the federal government what percentage of those kids graduate from college, they can't tell you. The second scandal is as far as we can estimate, that graduation rate is embarrassingly low."