As policy makers consider revisions to the Higher Education Act (HEA), understanding the impact of increasing the size of Pell grants is important if it is to have the intended impact of improving educational outcomes for lower income students across the various types of colleges and universities. Understanding institutional behavior is a place to…

In response to goals of expanding access as well as public pressure to leverage substantial endowment resources toward increasing affordability, numerous elite colleges have enacted policies aimed at improving access and affordability by replacing student loans with grants in financial aid packages. No-loan policies, however, differ in the extent…

The federal Pell Grant was designed to help low-income students pay for college. But over the past two decades, a growing share of middle-income students have become eligible for the program. This was not policymakers' explicit goal. This report examines how the program came to increasingly provide students from middle-income families with grants,…

The COVID-19 health crisis has laid bare the structural inequity in the financial aid system. The pandemic has hit the lowest-income students hardest, with many struggling to afford the basic technology for online learning on top of new or exacerbated food and housing insecurity. Federal and state dollars predicated on Pell Grant eligibility, time…