Deciding which college you’ll attend isn’t easy because there are many things to consider: cost, student diversity, graduation rates, starting salary for graduates, and more. So, how do you pick the one that’s best for you?
Don’t worry, FGLIstudents.org is here to help. Using our exclusive College Results Score (CRS) makes this decision easier than ever. Plus, it takes into account factors that are of special importunate to first-generation and limited-income students.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’ve been accepted to the following two colleges. Which one would you pick and why?”
That’s more challenging to parse out than it might seem on the surface. According to Dale and Krueger, FGLI students get different benefits than your average CC family.
I followed the link and I was trying to find the scale to see what the score range was and what was a better score. The scores go from 1-100, with 100 being the best. Their overview page shows the scores for these four schools:
U. of Minnesota - Twin Cities: 10
Rice: 12
UC-Davis: 22
U. of Michigan - Ann Arbor: 12
If 100 is the goal, there is obviously a long way to go in helping to serve this population, according to the formula.
The best college in my state was a public regional school with a 15. Did anyone have any happy surprises while looking at their states?
I’ll admit I do not necessarily understand how this will really help you decide on a college.
Like, the percentage of students eligible for a Pell Grant might be interesting to someone looking at this from a social policy perspective, but the question for you as an individual choosing a college is whether you actually are eligible for a Pell Grant. Same with the average COA data–maybe relevant to some policy issues but it seems to me what you need as an individual is your actual offered COA.
I guess the graduation percentage for Pell Grant students might be good to know. The average salary, though, is so subject to confounding variables I would not really advise using that.
Dominguez Hills is highly rated for social mobility, tops in one ranking. Schools that do well in social mobility rankings tend to have a high proportion of Pell Grant students, low COA, and relatively high graduation rates. The highly rejectives generally do poorly in social mobility rankings.
Combining the FGLI student data from the OP with other measures can definitely help Pell grant students target schools that make sense for them, because most of them don’t have their sights set on highly rejectives.
I just couldn’t find the methodology. There has to be categories for resources found a schools that serve a lot of FGLIs that aren’t found a “typical colleges.”
It’s interesting because Dale and Krueger found that when sorting for GPA and test scores, the only students that benefitted more from going to highly rejective schools, that they would have at a lower ranked school were FGLIs. It was because they were exposed to the support mechanisms that typically came from families for the typical CC family kid.
I had then read that wasn’t fully accurate, that some need more help than they were getting and that there was a high drop out rate.
Maybe this algorithm is identifying the best balance.
I think later studies have suggested the cause might more be that higher-income/multi-gen applicants were more likely to attend another very selective private or flagship public if they didn’t get into an Ivy+.
A few comments…I do think pell grant/disadvantaged students gain many benefits from attending highly rejective schools. I hadn’t heard that the D&K data for that are inaccurate.
The thing is the highly rejective schools aren’t doing that at scale. Around 50% of HS students would qualify for some level of Pell Grant (of course not all go to college)…so the volume is huge. And the highly rejective Pell enrollment is small.
USNWR and WSJ also have social mobility rankings and its generally the same types/set of schools that do well across these three rankings outfits…schools that matriculate a high proportion of Pell Grant students, apply various resources and supports, have relatively low COAs, and get most of these students to graduate.
I don’t think any of these social mobility rankings are necessarily ‘better’ than any other. The social mobility .org rankings I linked above discuss their methodology on the purpose page. https://www.socialmobilityindex.org/
At the risk of oversimplifying, I would suggest FGLI choosers would want to know their own individual COA, and then might want to consider the graduation rate for Pell Grant students. I am personally skeptical adding much more in terms of institutional statistics is going to be helpful. I think anything else, like whether a college is “good” for certain careers, is going to require a different sort of inquiry.
But for sure, knowing your actual cost and knowing if Pell Grant recipients are actually graduating seem like good things to know.
I will add that Pell Grant students at the highly rejectives have to take advantage of the resources too…no one is just going to hand them an internship or a job. They have to network, they have to go to the career center, practice interviewing, etc. etc.
If a Pell Grant student can get in to a highly rejective it likely makes sense for them to attend. But the vast majority of Pell Grant students don’t have that option.
In fact I just looked up my state. All the highly rejective colleges were in the high-80s to 90s range for Pell Grant graduation. Fair enough, but that is so few kids in total.
OK, then there was one college with over a 40% Pell Grant enrollment, but less than a 50% Pell Grant graduation rate, and another with over a 50% Pell Grant enrollment, and again under a 50% Pell Grant graduation rate. That’s a real problem!
And yet they both were among the highest-scorers in the state by this measure, I guess because they had such a low average cost (but also low average salaries).
I’m really not feeling like this measure is helping. I think the obvious conclusion is if you can get a rare admission + big aid package to one of the highly rejectives, definitely do that no matter what this measure says.
Absent that, I was not convinced the lower cost of these above options really, say, made them better bets than the publics where the average cost was higher, but Pell Grant students actually graduated and (likely) got decent jobs.
Which I guess is what studies have pointed out, that too often if FGLIs do not get into the most selective colleges, they drop into a class of college which often does not work out so well for them, as opposed to just moving into another still-good selective college.
Many low income students are financially limited, so their college choices may be limited to highly selective colleges with good financial aid (however, if they have uncooperative divorced parents, many of these will be inaccessible), some less selective colleges where they get the top merit scholarships, and local (usually less selective) state schools that they can commute to. “Another still-good selective college” may be ruled out due to cost and insufficient financial aid.
Regarding graduation rates, these tend to be more related to admission selectivity and affordability. Obviously, better financial aid can improve graduation rates, but most colleges do not have the money (especially if more of their students have high financial aid need). For any individual student, the likelihood of graduation from any particular college is probably more based on the student’s own academic strength and ability to afford that college, rather than the college’s overall graduation rates.
Similarly, pay levels after graduation tend to be more related to major than college, except for the case of preferential recruiting from high prestige colleges by certain employers (the usual ones of Wall Street and management consulting).
I have not read this site in depth, but I found the discussion about the relationship of Pell grants and social mobility really interesting. My kids are Pell grant recipients, but our family is not poor, and I wonder just how “low income” the FGLI families are at highly rejective schools. D22 has mentioned one friend at her college who comes from a homeless household with recurring hunger issues, but she has only mentioned one such classmate. She has many classmates who receive financial aid, but the majority (I suspect) are not living below the poverty line including those who like us receive significant financial aid including pell grants.
Of course, graduation rates are important in general vis a vis economic mobility because college graduates outearn those who do not finish their degrees. [Cf. The Cost of College Dropout ] However, from a policy standpoint, there is an invidious “shortcut” available if a university is focusing only on higher graduation rates: admit wealthier students. This owes to the fact that higher graduation rates correlate strongly with higher family incomes. [Cf: Home - JHU Institute for Education Policy ] We attempt to attenuate this flaw in aggregate graduation data for the SMI by computing a graduation score for each school that is weighted in favor of graduation rates for Pell recipients. This method carries limitations, however, given that Pell grants are being increasingly awarded to richer families and thus cannot serve as a singular indicator that recipients are from economically underserved families (see discussion below). Hence, the second-tier weighting for graduation scores in the overall SMI rankings
AND
Our effort is aimed at defining an “economic mobility” index on an independent, accountable, and quantitative basis…
Despite its widespread promotion as a gold standard for inclusiveness, Pell grant participation is, in fact, a very poor indicator of campus economic diversity. Pell Grant participation is misleading as an indicator for access because Pell Grants are not consistently given to students from disadvantaged family economic backgrounds. We broke new ground in the 2015 SMI by revealing, for each campus, the minimum percentage of its Pell Grant recipients who come from families making more than $48,000 annually. The data show that at many campuses, over half of their Pell Grant recipients are from this richer segment of our nation’s population. Further, as reported by the US Dept of Education, deductions and exclusions in the Pell Grant formula now permit some families making over $100,000 per year to receive Pell Grant awards. The data make it clear that contrary to the prevailing narrative, Pell Grant participation should not be considered as a singular indicator of a college’s commitment to access and inclusiveness. (Cf. The Pell Grant proxy: A ubiquitous but flawed measure of low-income student enrollment | Brookings)
(Cf. Pell Grants Are Now A Middle-Class Benefit)
Yes, Pell eligibility extends up to the middle income range (which is different from the “middle class” as the term is used on these forums), with probably nearly half of high school students being Pell eligible if they go to college. However, about a third of actual college students get Pell grants.
“Low income” would correspond more to full Pell grant.
With the new FAFSA not considering untaxed income, I think it is easier for some middle income families to get closer to the full Pell Grant. This whole thread is from a poster with a family income of 130K and a full pell grant.
However, the main reason why I brought this issue up is because I am curious about how traditional measures of social mobility may or may not be accurate at some colleges. Mwfan1921 and eyemgh were discussing what type of college provides the most benefit for FGLI for families. Apparently, the Dale & Krueger study suggests that the only students that really benefit from attending highly rejective colleges are those from FGLI families. However, the social mobility web site seems to contradict this idea or at least it doesn’t give high mobility scores to those rejective colleges. I am trying to understand that seeming contradiction. The highest score went to California State University-Dominguez Hills despite the generosity of some meet needs-no loan schools like Brown or Williams.
Mostly, I think perhaps https://www.socialmobilityindex.org is defining the benefits provided to low income students differently than Dale & Krueger. The social mobility index is interested in overall societal responsibility/benefit not individual personal benefit. However, I also wonder if the difference also lies in the relatively high income of pell grant recipients at those rejective colleges. No matter how high one’s post-graduating starting salary, there may not seem to be as much mobility for a graduate if they came from a pell grant family that makes 130K vs. a graduate who came pell grant family that makes 25K.
No, that’s not what they said. They said FGLI students are the only subset that will benefit MORE if they attend a highly rejective school. All others that have the stats to get in, will thrive equally anywhere. The latter group’s success is baked in HS. FGLI students, on average, aren’t because they don’t, angain, on average, have the same support group.
I’m sorry to be dense, but I don’t understand the difference. How is saying that non-FGLI students will thrive equally anywhere different than saying that FGLI students are the only ones who benefit more from attending a highly rejective school (compared to attending other colleges)? I am not getting the distinction that you are making. Can you clarify?
ETA: Also, I am trying to understand what the non monetary costs and benefits are of attending college. Do those costs and benefits vary with the ranking of the college? Whose ranking? For FGLI families, what is the relationship between those costs and benefits and the selectivity of a given college? I know so many FGLI families who believe that admission to a very rejective college equals a “golden ticket” into the upper class. Is going to Princeton or Yale really a “golden ticket” for low income families? The social mobility index site seems to be suggest that attending a highly selective colleges may not provide benefits as strong that those families believe despite the available financial aid.
