Bachelor’s degree attainment in the U.S. continues to grow, but the researchers point to “persisting inequality” that sees high shares of students of color and low-income and nontraditional students attending lower-spending or less-competitive institutions.
The report’s authors — the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education and the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy — show how these trends play out in several ways.
The share of Pell Grant recipients attending schools in the two quintiles that spend the least on education grew by several percentage points in the last two decades, while those in higher-spending brackets shrank.
