Press Release: New Study Documents Prominent Representation and Success of Low-Income Undergraduates at the University of California

CSHE > News > Press Release: New Study Documents Prominent Representation and Success of Low-Income Undergraduates at the University of California

September 29, 2008

A new study by CSHE researchers John Douglass and Gregg Thomson explores the divide between poor and rich students, comparing a group of selective institutions and their number and percentage of Pell Grant recipients. “A number of national studies point to a trend in which highly selective and elite private and public universities are becoming less accessible to lower-income students,” explain Douglass and Thomson, “but as our research shows, selective institutions differ dramatically in the number of low-income students who are admitted and enrolled.”

Further, the new research findings of Douglass and Thomson challenge the prevailing notion that low-income students have significantly less satisfactory experiences and outcomes than their more wealthy peers.

The first section of their paper looks at the relative presence of low-income students among a group of 32 public and private selective higher education institutions; the second section analyzes the academic engagement and performance of low- and high-income students at the University of California – which has among the highest percentage of low-income students in the nation among highly selective universities. Indeed, as the researchers state, “the UC campuses of Berkeley, Davis, and UCLA each have more Pell Grant students than all the eight Ivy League institutions combined.”

In general, public universities are much more accessible to lower-income students for a variety of reasons, they explain. “In addition to greater capacity, lower tuition, and, relative to the costs of attending a university, the greater availability of financial aid, cultural and demographic differences partly explain why selective private institutions have relatively small numbers of low-income students,” note Douglass and Thomson. “For instance, UC draws the vast majority of its students from a demographically rich California population, much of which is low-income and finds UC more accessible than a far-away elite university, an accessibility significantly enhanced by the community college transfer function. Private institutions, essentially limited to freshman admissions, still tend to be biased in their admissions policies toward students with certain academic characteristics, like high standardized test scores, and certain financial and cultural profiles.”

Douglass states that “even with the belated moves to provide a form of progressive tuition by wealthy private universities and colleges, in which up front costs are lower for low- and some middle-income students, I sense that the income profiles of new students to Ivy League and many other selective privates will change only marginally in the near future.” He and Thomson also note that the collective impact of any increase in lower-income students at highly selective private universities will be limited. The fifty ‘best’ (read most selective) liberal arts colleges in the US enroll collectively less than .6% of all Pell Grant enrollments in 2006.

“Perhaps most important for the future of low-income students is not institutionally derived aid, but increases in thus far inadequate federal grants and loans and, thereby, a sense that elite public and private institutions might be within the grasp of a low-income student,” Douglass notes.

“With the recent debacle in financial markets and long-term downward pressure on the economy, disparities in wealth may further be extenuated. The next presidential administration needs to step up to the plate and rethink and expand financial aid to low- and middle-income students as their numbers grow,” state Douglass and Thomson. The US Department of Education recently estimated that demand for Pell Grants exceeded projected demand by some 800,000 students; total applications for the grant program are up 16 percent over the previous year. This will require an additional $6 billion to be added to the Pell Grant’s current budget of $14 billion next year.

The second section of the paper uses a comprehensive data set from Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Project based at CSHE. Unique to the University of California, this data set combines more than 57,000 responses from the spring 2006 census survey of all UC undergraduates with institutional data. With nearly a third of UC undergraduates being Pell Grant recipients, the Douglass and Thomson research examines in-depth the experience of more low-income undergraduates than any previous study. In fact, as Thomson explains, “In undertaking our study, we were really quite surprised by the paucity of previous in-depth quantitative research on the quality of the undergraduate experience of low-income students in general and Pell Grant students in particular. For our study we are fortunate to have more than 15,000 Pell Grant recipients who provided us information about their undergraduate experience at the University of California.”

The experiences of Pell Grant recipients (typically students from families with incomes of $40,000 or less) are compared with three other groups: students who did not qualify for Pell Grants but still qualified for need-based financial aid; non–financial aid students with family incomes under $125,000; and non-financial aid students with family incomes of $125,000 and higher. Douglass and Thomson focus on the contrast between the experiences of “poor” (Pell Grant recipients) and “rich” (family incomes of $125,000 and up) students. The authors find that low-income (“poor”) students at the University of California generally fare as well academically as high-income (“rich”) students.

Among the findings of the paper:
- At UC three in every four Pell Grant recipients are either first- or second-generation immigrant students and one in every three has at least one parent with a four-year college degree, suggesting the need to rethink the assumption that “low-income” students are also “first-generation college-going” (and vice versa).
- Pell Grant recipients at UC have only slightly lower GPAs than their wealthy counterparts; this is true in both math, science, and engineering and in humanities and social science fields.
- Poor students at UC generally have the same levels of satisfaction with various aspects of their undergraduate experience (e.g., quality of advising received) and in their sense of belonging within a campus community as rich students.
- There are some small but intriguing differences across UC campuses with poor students less satisfied relative to their affluent peers at those campuses where there are smaller proportions of lower-income students.

For access to the study, see: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?s=1

John Aubrey Douglass is Senior Research Fellow – Public Policy and Higher Education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, and the author most recently of The Conditions for Admissions: Access, Equity and the Social Contract of Public Universities (Stanford University Press, 2007) and is co-PI of the SERU Project; Gregg Thomson is Director of the Office of Student Research at UC Berkeley and is a co-PI of the SERU Project. David Radwin at OSR and a SERU Project Associate collaborated and contributed to data analysis.

CONTACT:
John Aubrey Douglass, douglass@berkeley.edu
Gregg Thomson, gthomson@berkeley.edu