The Next Best: High Pell, Low Net Price

In 2009, the school now known as Utah Valley University (UVU) faced a defining moment. State legislators had voted the previous summer to turn the open-access community college into a four-year public university, and some faculty members were arguing that the institution should try to climb the prestige ladder and transform itself into a research university. But Matthew Holland, the university’s new president, had an alternative path in mind. Like Nancy Cantor, Holland, who left the university this year to become a mission president for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, argued that the school should value inclusiveness over exclusivity.¹

He knew the path he wanted to take—maintaining open-enrollment admissions at a four-year university—was unusual even among regional public universities. “There’s a lot of Harvard envy out there,” Holland told Inside Higher Ed in January, while recounting the choices that the university faced at the time.² But instead of aping Harvard, Utah Valley has made achieving socioeconomic diversity a primary mission. In 2015–16, Pell Grant recipients made up 34 percent of the study body, and the school charged its lowest-income, in-state freshmen an average net price of $6,794.

UVU is one of 162 public colleges and universities at which Pell Grant recipients made up between 30 and 49 percent of the student body and the lowest-income, in-state freshmen paid an average net price below $10,000 in 2015–16.

Source: The above data are from the Department of Education. This is only a selection of schools in the category.

Nearly all of these schools are regional colleges. Some are part of state systems, like California State and CUNY and SUNY campuses, which have been helping low-income and working-class students enter the middle class for generations. Only two—the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the University of California at Berkeley—are public flagship universities. There are, however, a number of satellites of flagship institutions. Generally these schools, like the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and the University of Tennessee at Martin, are less selective than the flagships and tend to enroll students who are weaker academically and lower on the income scale than those attending the main campus.

The Equality of Opportunity Project’s landmark study on social mobility had good and bad news for public regional colleges.³ The researchers found that these schools have been the unsung heroes of higher education in terms of helping low- and moderate-income students rise up the income ladder. But they also discovered that many of these schools have become less accessible in recent years.⁴

Take Stony Brook University, a public research university in Long Island that has had a strong track record of providing social mobility to its less well-off students. The study found that since the late 1990s, the share of traditionally aged Stony Brook students coming from families in the bottom 40 percent of the income scale (those with annual incomes below $37,000 in 2013) had dropped by 8.5 percentage points. At the same time, the share of students in the top 20 percent had grown by about 7 percentage points.⁵

Looking at the Education Department’s Pell Grant data, it appears that the decline in low-income students has been especially steep over the last five years. In fact, the share of Pell Grant recipients grew from 30 to 37 percent between 2008–09 and 2011–12 but has fallen steadily since then to 33 percent.⁶

This drop came at a time when the state has significantly decreased the share of the university’s budget that it covers. To make up for lost revenue, Stony Brook ratcheted up its enrollment of wealthy foreign students and higher-paying out-of-state students, which appears to have left fewer seats available for low-income and working-class ones from New York.⁷

Many public universities are going down the same path as Stony Brook: seeking out wealthier students to make up for state budget cuts and to become more prestigious. Year after year, the enrollment management offices at these schools release strategic plans where they show how they are going to work their magic to make their schools more selective and rise up the U.S. News rankings, while bringing in more revenue.

Not Utah Valley. Instead, the school, which currently enrolls about 37,000 students, published a “strategic inclusion” plan, where it laid out its goals to bring in more low-income and minority students, as well as those who are the first in their families to go to college.⁸ Among other things, the plan calls for more actively recruiting underrepresented students and raising money for generous scholarships to help these students pay for college.⁹ These moves are paying off. Nearly two out of every five undergraduates at UVU are first-generation students.

The most significant decisions that Holland made, however, were to have the university remain open to everyone and to take a “structured enrollment” approach. Under this policy, students who don’t have grades or ACT scores that the school considers “college-ready” are placed in the university’s certificate or associate degree programs. Certificate students can then move up to earn an associate degree, and associate-degree recipients can use their credits to skip ahead to upper division courses so that they can earn a bachelor’s degree within at least two years. This structured approach, which several public universities in Utah have adopted, allows community college students to pursue a bachelor’s degree without having to transfer to another institution and risk losing hard-earned credits.¹⁰

Having a community college within a university not only provides “more opportunities for more people,” Holland wrote last year, but also has “a cultural upside.”¹¹

“There is considerable value in bringing together student populations not normally educated at the same institution,” he stated. “As racial and class violence and polarized populations roil the country, bringing together disparate sets of people to learn and socialize together can help bridge the gap between educated elites and the working classes, as well as other divides.”¹²

“I see it happen every day at UVU,” he added.