The Nation’s Wealthiest Universities Are Doing a Poor Job in Enrolling More Low-Income Students

At the 10 universities in the United States with the largest endowments, the value of these funds have grown an average of more than 30 percent over the 2004 to 2006 period. But at nine of the 10 universities with the largest endowments, the percentage of low-income students has declined during the same period.

JBHE has obtained from the U.S. Department of Education new data on Pell Grant recipients. Although sometimes flawed or misread, U.S. Department of Education statistics on Pell Grants are generally accepted as a standard measure of the percentage and number of low-income students at a particular institution.

The Pell Grant data shows that in the two years from 2004 to 2006 Harvard University is the only one of the 10 universities with the largest endowments to show a gain in low-income students. At Harvard the percentage of all undergraduate students receiving federal Pell Grants increased from 9.4 percent in 2004 to 11.9 percent in 2006.

At the other nine universities with the largest endowments, the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants declined in the 2004 to 2006 period. In some cases the declines were modest. But at the University of Pennsylvania, the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants dropped from 12 percent in 2004 to 8.8 percent in 2006. At Columbia, the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants declined from 17.1 percent to 15.3 percent in just two years.

In reporting results for such a short, two-year time span, we must caution that data for any particular institution may be a statistical anomaly and may not be of great value as an indication of a long-term trend. Yet it is troublesome that over the long term of 23 years since 1983, eight of the 10 universities with the largest endowments have shown a decline in the percentage of low-income students. Only Emory University and Stanford University showed small increases in their percentage of low-income students in the 1983 to 2006 period.

Copyright © 2007. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.