Pell Grants are the cornerstone of federal financial aid for students with low income who are enrolled in postsecondary education. Currently, these grants are available only to those who seek an initial undergraduate degree or credential requiring at least a typical semester of instruction. Because these rules may restrict access to programs…

The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate the relationship between federal Pell Grant status, campus diversity statistics, and their influence on graduation rates within higher education. This study focuses on higher education institutions in the state of Texas and adopts a quantitative design that utilizes a regression analysis to…

The Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Investment met to hear testimony on ''Keeping the Pell Grant Promise: Increasing Enrollment, Supporting Success.'' The meeting was entirely remote. The aim of the meeting was to examine trends related to Pell eligible students' access to public four-year institutions, the State and institutional…

The annual Performance Accountability Report (PAR) serves as an important mechanism by which public colleges and universities in Maryland are held accountable. Through a performance accountability plan, institutions are required to establish and maintain performance standards, and use metrics to assess their effectiveness in tackling institutional…

This dissertation includes three chapters focusing on policies directly related to improving college access and success. The first chapter focuses on lifetime eligibility of federal and state financial aid policies. The Pell Grant plays a critical role in helping students across the US to afford undergraduate education. In spite of its importance…

The recent significant increase in student loan delinquencies has generated interest in understanding the key factors predicting the non-performance of these loans. However, despite the large size of the student loan market, existing analyses have been limited by lack of data. This paper studies predictors of student loan delinquencies using a…

As the nation's student-loan debt surpasses the $1-trillion mark, alarming students, parents, and politicians, few are thinking about the effects it is having on people like Michael J. Trivette, a 28-year-old graduate student in higher education at the University of Georgia. Two-thirds of Ph.D. and other doctoral students and nearly three-quarters…

Several wealthy colleges and universities have recently begun removing all loans from low-income students' financial aid packages. This article reports on a study that found that the introduction of "no-loan" policies has positively impacted low-income enrollments, suggesting that this aid strategy may be an effective, though limited,…

One of the original purposes of student financial aid was to ensure fairer access to post-secondary education to those least able to afford it and to those traditionally underrepresented. Various federal and state programs were put in place to achieve this goal, including the federal Pell Grant and state aid programs. Yet policymakers and…

This study examined the relationship between engaging institutional environments and alumni donor participation rates at 310 colleges and universities. The study found that engaging environments have positive relationships to alumni donor participation rates at Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions, but the relationship is not significant at Masters…

In this study, I capitalize on a natural experiment to examine the effect of federal Pell Grant eligibility on college enrollment for students who graduated from high school in spring 2004 and who completed the "Free Application for Federal Student Aid" (FAFSA). Data from the "Education Longitudinal Study of 2002" are used to…