Pew’s analysis puts a spotlight on how the share of minority, adult and low-income students among the college-going population is growing. Yet their enrollment has been uneven across institutions.
For example, the portion of dependent students from low-income families that community colleges and for-profit institutions enroll has risen by 14 and 13 percentage points, respectively, from 1996 to 2016. Meanwhile, other types of institutions saw “more modest” gains with this group, with public and nonprofit, private four-year colleges both seeing increases of six percentage points or less during that time.
