Melissa Korn

speaker

822 appearances 14 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2017 last heard Sep 2024

Melissa Korn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Colleges Slip on Pledge to Enroll Lower-Income Students · 16 Sep 2022 podcast

The other factor here is this sort of initiative, increasing enrollment by lower income students, is expensive for schools.

And a lot of them have great intentions, but ultimately don't have the money to put behind a really robust financial aid package that can bridge that gap between what the Pell Grant covers and full cost.

So one of the really interesting things from the progress report was just how

varied the success stories and less successful stories maybe.

There are large public universities that are doing really well that have added thousands of low income and lower income students over the past few years.

University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, to name a few.

And then you've got some large public universities that have actually seen Pell enrollment decline significantly, including UCLA.

And some of the other UC, University of California campuses have seen increases.

So even within a single university system, you've got disparities.

Caveats with Colby's success story is that they are a small school, so they were doubling off of fairly low numbers.

One of the biggest things they did was increase financial aid.

They've doubled their financial aid budget over the past five or six years.

They also tried to simplify their financial aid.

As their president told me, just talking about financial aid and navigating all that can be one of the biggest barriers for students.

So what they did was say a blanket statement that if your family earns $75,000 or less, you're covered.

Tuition room and board are covered.

If your family earns under $150,000, there's a cap of how much you would be expected to pay each year.

Also, having college presidents use their bully pulpit, really talking about this nonstop, both externally and internally, making sure that the board of trustees is on board with this.

And they understand the value of it and that they're not going to get lower quality students just because they're lower income students.

And then programs like cohort based programs where you bring in a whole group of students together and you create a community for them.

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