Does Your Favorite Private College Serve Low-Income Students Well? Find Out Here.

[The New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program recently released “Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind,” a report that presents a new analysis of little-examined U.S. Department of Education data showing the “net price” – the amount students pay after all grant aid has been exhausted – for low-income students at individual colleges. This is the seventh and final post in a series related to the report’s findings. Read earlier parts of the series here, here, here, here, here, and here.]

How do individual private colleges stack up in terms of their commitment to serving low-income students? To answer that question, it is important to look at both the proportion of low-income students they serve and how much those students are asked to pay. As this graphic shows, some institutions are authentically committed to enrolling low-income students and charging them affordable prices, while others — including some that are extremely wealthy (those with the largest circles) — are stingy with their admissions slots, their aid dollars, or both. Click on the graphic below for an interactive dataset that allows you to compare colleges.

This graphic has been updated from an earlier version to reflect changes that some private colleges have recently made to their net price data.