Two years ago, the University of Pittsburgh set a goal of enrolling more low-income students on its main campus. But the country’s poorest students still make up a smaller share of Pitt’s student body than they do at many other top public research universities, according to a PublicSource analysis.
Those students are Pell Grant recipients. The majority who receive the grants, a form of federal financial aid, come from families earning less than $40,000 a year. They’re more likely to be Black, Indigenous or Hispanic. They’re also likely to be first-generation college students or parents.
When universities enroll Pell recipients, they allow low-income and marginalized students to access the increased lifetime earnings that a four-year degree often provides, making upward mobility more possible. But Pitt doesn’t provide the same level of access to these students as some other universities do.
Compare that to the University of California, Irvine, where Pell recipients made up 38% of the student body that academic year. Or the University of South Florida, where they made up 32%. Or the University of Arizona, where they made up 29%. Or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where they made up 23%.
The education department’s data generally allows for standardized comparisons to universities nationwide, but Pitt pushed back against PublicSource’s analysis. Spokesperson Jared Stonesifer said the department requires Pitt to include high schoolers taking courses at the university in its enrollment numbers. That tacks on up to 4,000 extra students who can’t receive Pell Grants, making the percentage of Pell recipients seem smaller than it is, he said.
To exclude the high schoolers, PublicSource used the federal data to compare Pitt’s share of freshmen Pell recipients to the same group of nearly 40 top public research universities. Pitt tied with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and The Ohio State University’s main campus for enrolling the seventh-fewest in the 2020-21 academic year, at 17%. That percentage doesn’t account for transfer students who receive Pell Grants.
Pitt provided data to show that, overall, undergraduate Pell recipients on its main campus made up about 17% of the student body last academic year.
But even that percentage is “very far from meeting the mark” when roughly a third of undergraduates nationwide receive a Pell Grant, said James Murphy, deputy director of higher education policy at Education Reform Now, a nonpartisan think tank and advocacy organization.
However, the highly selective University of California, Los Angeles – which admitted about 9% of applicants in fall 2022 – enrolled a greater share of undergraduate Pell recipients in the 2020-21 academic year. So did The University of Texas at Austin, which admitted about 31% of applicants in fall 2022. So did Stony Brook University, which had roughly the same acceptance rate as Pitt last fall.