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Served, Yes, But Well-Served?

October 8, 2009

The list published by the Student Lending Analytics blog last month jumped off the computer screen: Of the 10 colleges and universities whose students received the most Pell Grant funds in 2008–9, 7 were for-profit institutions. The massive University of Phoenix led the way with 230,000 students receiving Pell Grants worth a total of $560 million, way above No. 2, Kaplan University. The only public institution on the list was the 19-campus Pennsylvania State University, and two of the 10 (one for-profit, one private nonprofit) were in Puerto Rico.

There are plenty of caveats about the list and why it doesn’t fully represent the true Pell Grant picture. Foremost among them, by far, is the fact that the Education Department database from which the numbers were drawn lists individual institutions.

So huge community college districts (like Phoenix’s Maricopa Community Colleges) or public college systems (like the City University of New York) that serve huge numbers of poor students don’t show up as single entities, while for-profit colleges like Phoenix and DeVry — which are structured in a way that makes them equivalent to university “systems” — do. (If the Maricopa colleges were lumped together, they’d show up in the middle of the top 10, as currently constructed, with about $60 million. CUNY and California State University would appear well above that.)

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