Poor students shut out

from the Chicago Sun Times

HIGHER EDUCATION | Number receiving Pell Grants declining at top schools

BY DAVE NEWBART Staff Reporter/dnewbart@suntimes.com

The number of low-income students at the area's top universities continues to shrink.

The University of Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame and the University of Illinois have each seen a drop in the number of students who qualify for Pell Grants -- federal aid to the neediest students.

The drops mirror declines at the wealthiest schools nationwide, where Pell recipients dipped to 13.1 percent of students in 2006-2007 at the 75 private schools with endowments of more than $500 million, according to an analysis by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Pell recipients now total 18 percent of undergrads at the 39 best-endowed public universities.


Critics of rising college costs have questioned why the schools don't spend more of their endowments to halt skyrocketing tuition. A small number of schools -- most notably Harvard -- have responded by replacing loans with grants for students from poor and middle-income families and reducing costs even for families making up to $180,000 a year.

But others say the problem goes deeper, because as the nation's top schools get more selective, lower-income students get crowded out.

"Because of their poverty, they've gone all their lives to inferior schools and haven't got a prayer either of getting into an elite college or of doing the work when they get there,'' said Walter Benn Michaels, an English professor at the U. of I.'s Chicago campus and author of The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.

Michaels said the tuition reforms at the most elite schools "only make things worse'' -- particularly in the case of Harvard -- because the discounts are funded by the school's $29 billion endowment. University endowments are tax-free, as are donations to endowments, meaning there is an indirect public subsidy, he said.

Not surprisingly, Harvard ranked near the bottom of the Chronicle's list, with just 8.1 percent of its students receiving Pell grants. But some area schools didn't rank much higher.

Notre Dame, whose endowment was worth $4.5 billion in 2006, ranked 66th out of the 75 schools listed. Just 8.6 percent of its 8,350 undergrads qualify for Pell.

"This is a year where it slipped a little bit," said Joe Russo, director of Student Financial Strategies at Notre Dame. Russo said the school is doing some "very generous things" for "truly needy lower-income students" enrolling next year. He declined to give details.

At Northwestern, which ranked 63rd, spokesman Al Cubbage said the declining value of Pell grants -- they had remained stagnant for years until Congress passed legislation increasing them last year -- could be part of the reason for a slight decline in lower-income students at NU. He noted that the school hopes to attract more poor students by eliminating loans for students for families earning less than $55,000. The school will also cap the total amount of federally backed loans any student will have to take at $20,000. At the University of Illinois, the percentage of Pell recipients dropped to about 15 percent of undergrads, ranking it 28th out of 39 public schools with the largest endowments.

But financial aid director Dan Mann said the school's number went up this year, and he said when final tallies are calculated the total will exceed 16 percent. He said part of the increase was because of Illinois Promise, a program that covers all costs for the 500 neediest students on campus.