Overview

This document focuses on graduation rates of Pell Grant students in California four-year colleges and universities. It was begun on September 6, 2019 and followed analysis conducted by Robert Kelchen at the Brookings Institution. Complementary to this is this Tableau workbook, which displays completions each year by age, ethnicity, and gender.

Background

The Pell Grant, created by the Higher Education Act of 1965, is a major Federal subsidy for first-time students who have not earned their first Bachelor’s degree. According to the latest report on the 2016-2017 award year (the latest available), the program provided grants ranging from $589-$5,815 to over 7.1 million students in 2016-2017, with awards totaling $34,526,404,000. Source

Notes about data

IPEDS released PELL graduation data for the first time in 2017. As with Kelchen’s 2017 analysis, there are a few things to note that apply to both years:

1. This only includes four-year colleges
2. The “cohort” variables refer to the number of students in the first-time, full-time (GRS) cohort in 2010.
3. The “grad rate” variables represent the 150% (6-year) graduation rate at the initial college of attendance for students in the GRS cohort.
4. The Pell cohort includes students who had a Pell grant in the entry year (2010 and 2011, respectively), regardless of later Pell receipt status.
5. There are likely a small number of errors in the IPEDS dataset, as the data are self-reported by colleges. I encourage readers to direct questions to individual institutions so they can correct the data in the next year.
6. In order to focus on trends over time, I have dropped institutions that have only one timepoint - this applies to 8 ICC institutions and 12 for profit institutions.

Other Cautions

Kelchen notes other areas of caution when interpreting this data. This particularly applies to number 3 below:

1. There are likely a few colleges that screwed up data reporting to ED. For example, gaps of 50% for larger colleges are likely an error, but nobody at the college caught them.
2. Beware the rates for small colleges (with fewer than 50 students in a cohort).
3. This graduation rate measure is the graduation rate for first-time, full-time students who complete a bachelor’s degree at the same institution within six years. It excludes part-time and transfer students, so global completion numbers will be higher.
4. There are some legitimate concerns with using percent Pell as an accountability measure. However, it’s the best measure that is currently available.