Tag: higher education
If Nearly A Million Incarcerated People Apply For Pell Grants, Are We Ready?

If Nearly A Million Incarcerated People Apply For Pell Grants, Are We Ready?

This is the first in a series of five articles on Pell Grant access for incarcerated students funded by a reporting fellowship from the Education Writers Association. Read the second, third, fourth and fifth in the series.

Almost two years ago, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) Simplification Act -- the largest revision to the 1965 Higher Education Act in 50 years and part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 -- was signed into law. It repealed the portion of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that made incarcerated students ineligible for federal Pell Grants to pay for college programs.

The law is set to take effect, complete with a new set of regulations, in about six months, on July 1, 2023. On that day, a forgotten and maligned subset of low-income higher education students -- namely hundreds of thousands of prisoners -- can become college contenders. They’ll become eligible to apply for these grants again after a 28-year hiatus.

The Numbers of Potential Applicants Are Large



The number of prisoners who will become eligible is probably well over 700,000. According to Dr. Sarah Tahamont, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, close to 75 percent of prisoners may be eligible. Dr. Tahamont used a representative sample of Pennsylvania inmates to extrapolate that estimate.

Leaving out the entire population in local jails, because they have fewer higher education offerings (although Pell Grants will continue to be available to students in jails; the Pell grant ban applied to people in state and federal prisons only), there are approximately 1,250,000 prisoners in state and federal prisons -- according to the 2022 “Whole Pie” report from the Prison Policy Initiative, their annual count of prison populations. Seventy-five percent of them amounts to at least 937,500 potential Pell Grant applicants. If Dr. Tahamont is correct that as many as 937,500 inmates will become eligible next summer, that’s a 42-fold increase in applicants that will happen instantly on July 1, 2023.

Pell Grants Address Poverty

Aside from denying them transformative experiences and knowledge, the ban on this need-based form of financial aid focused the discussion of higher education in prison on merit, whether these students forfeited their education through criminal acts or mere criminal allegations. The discussion glossed over what prisoners are and always have been: poor people who couldn’t afford college and were therefore excluded from it.

In 2016, the last date for which data was available, 39 percent of dependent (under age 24) students and 67 percent of independent (over age 24) students lived in or near poverty. These percentages didn’t include any incarcerated students. This particular population has been left out of any analysis of low-income students for decades.

As much as poverty is an outcome of incarceration, it’s also a predictor of it. According to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, about 42 percent of state inmates received public assistance before the age of 18. Nineteen percent of them lived in subsidized or public housing and 11 percent experienced homelessness as children. Unsurprisingly, about 62 percent of them never completed high school.

The proscription on Pell Grants for prisoners was just a way to reinforce that poverty, although it’s not clear that the lawmakers who supported the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994 fully understood that; even the late Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, the namesake of the financial aid for lower-income students, voted yes on the bill that would snatch educational opportunities from prisoners. Senator Pell wouldn’t survive to weigh in on restoring eligibility.

Now that the ban is over, the conversation should shift from what these students don’t deserve to what they can’t afford — and the ways to remedy that deficit.

Pell Grants can be a fix here, but the question of whether the system will be ready for expanded eligibility is unavoidable.

Experimental So Far -- And Focused On Preventing Crime

Since prisoners’ access to Pell Grants has been prohibited since 1994, any recent use of that funding for inmates’ college courses has been an experiment that provided considerable leeway to those who undertook it.Under the Higher Education Act, the U.S. Secretary of Education has the authority to offer experiments according to the Experimental Sites Initiative, sometimes referred to as ESI, which allows the department to test the efficiency of statutory and regulatory flexibility for participating institutions disbursing Title IV student aid.

And that’s precisely what then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan did. He used the fiat power provided to him by the Higher Education Act to start the pilot Pell Grant program, and invited higher education institutions to apply to participate in it.

Since 2016, the Department of Education has been test-running Pell Grants for prisoners. The Second Chance Experimental Site Initiative, colloquially called the Second Chance Pell Grant program, grew from 63 participant colleges to 130 colleges in 2000 and then to 200 by 2021. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, those 200 schools, which enroll different numbers of students ranging from served 22,117 students through 2020.

The goal of the Second Chance Pell program wasn’t to test how this type of financial aid would be distributed if the program were scaled. it was to determine whether this money should be distributed to incarcerated learners at all.

The Second Chance Pell Program was designed by the department to evaluate what happens when incarcerated students receive Pell grants and pursue postsecondary education and training with the goal of helping them get jobs, support their families, and turn their lives around.” said Dr. Benedict A. Dorsey, a federal official involved in preparing for the program's launch, at the 2022 Virtual Federal Student Aid Training Conference on December 2, 2022.

“The goal was to enhance public safety by breaking the cycle of recidivism and improving outcomes for people returning from prison, jail and juvenile facilities through grant funding for education programs in prison," Dorsey continued.

Experiment Offered Lessons

While the Pell Grant pilot program chiefly examined whether incarcerated students would benefit from grants, the pilot program didn't fail to provide insight into best practices for implementing full-scale Pell grant access. Advocates and Department of Education officials gleaned important insights into the best ways to implement these grants on an even larger scale, if and when such eligibility was authorized by Congress.

For instance, the earlier requirement that men under age 26 register with the Selective Service limited eligibility and therefore opportunities for male students. So the FAFSA Simplification Act removed this requirement. According to Professor Tahamont,, removing the Selective Service requirement expanded the percentage of students who would be eligible from about four to 15 percent under the Second Chance Pell program eligibility rules.

Education officials also discovered that all potential students had struggled to complete the FAFSA form. It was especially challenging for incarcerated applicants because it asked for information that wasn’t readily available to many inmates, like parents’ tax returns.

The statute reduced the number of questions on the FAFSA overall, removed the question about past convictions for drug-related crimes, and revised the formula used to means-test applicants. A new Student Aid Index (SAI) will replace the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) calculation, a key development for low-to no income prisoners because it eliminates the question of the number of family members in college – usually minimal or unknown for a carceral population – and the allows the SAI – the amount that the student may be expected to pay – to run into negative territory, an accurate representation for people who earn anywhere from $0.14 to $1.41 per hour if their prison jobs pay at all.

In these respects, the revisions will benefit incarcerated applicants alongside everyone else using the form.

But a few changes will help an incarcerated student more than others. The new law made incarceration or parental incarceration an “unusual circumstance” that allows financial aid administrators to grant “dependency overrides” which basically lets applicants escape certain requirements on the application. It used to be that an unanswered question could strip a student of their aid package.

Internet access is not universal in correctional facilities and where it exists, it’s limited. It’s not clear how many students will be allowed to access technology to complete the form online. The Department of Education anticipates that most incarcerated applicants will complete a paper form, which led the agency to develop an entirely separate form for prisoners and a different address to receive them, proving that the committees that oversaw the rules for implementation are attuned to the unusual needs and challenges of people in prisons and jails.

Just The Start

But other lessons that should have stuck didn’t. And other questions have emerged, particularly about the regulations and rules that govern how the law will work and whether they may actually backfire and keep this old form of financial aid that’s been made new again from bringing postsecondary education – and the degrees it will lead to – within indigent prisoners’ reach.

The prison education system, writ large – the educational institutions, the correctional facilities, and sundry administrators – can only be considered ready for “Pell for All” by next summer if it's understood that making incarcerated students eligible is just the first, small step to giving them access to college and the credentials they need to succeed.

Many more steps and considerations require attention before all inmates who want to seek higher education will be able to do so.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.

College student in empty auditorium

What We Owe Our College Students

Two weeks into spring semester at the University of Florida, groups of unmasked college students — 30 or more at a time, many hollering as they partied — stood in lines to enter bars and clubs in Gainesville.

Photos in The Gainesville Sun showed them standing elbow to elbow, ear to ear. I've seen more space between parentheses. This is precisely what we are not supposed to do as this pandemic continues to rage.

The beginning of this sentence in the accompanying story caught my eye: "Though most students were wary to talk to The Sun, those who did said they weren't afraid of picking up the virus because they weren't at risk of infecting elderly, vulnerable family members, would get tested before returning home or already had COVID-19."

So much hubris in that flotilla of thought bubbles, but their reticence to speak to a reporter suggests that some of them knew what they were doing was potentially dangerous. There's a lot of hope in that.

These are not bad kids. For starters, they're not kids. They're young adults whose brains are still developing, and we ask so much of them, especially now. College is supposed to be a time of growth and self-discovery, where students are encouraged to run at full speed, wings spread wide. Instead, we are grounding them and asking that they behave better than many of the supposed grown-ups in their orbits.

One of the reasons I have faith in these students to do better is my experience in teaching college ethics during COVID-19 in the journalism school at my alma mater, Kent State. While we try to stay focused on issues hitched to our profession, it has been impossible to ignore the other ethical dilemmas swirling around us right now.

Most of my students work hourly wage jobs to stay in school, and too many employers have been willing to put them at risk because they know their young employees can't afford to quit.

Families, too, can be unfairly demanding. Their grandparents miss them; their younger siblings need them as they struggle to learn from home. Parents with the best intentions succumb to exhaustion and turn to their college students to help keep home life afloat.

And so we've talked, twice a week in our Zoom classroom, about how to ethically navigate this scary and complicated time in our country.

I've heard the arguments, often voiced as complaints, that children should be taught ethics at a much earlier age. Agreed, but young adulthood is complicated, and we all benefit from their exploring what it means to be an ethical person at their age.

Ethics discussions help students discover who they are and what lines they won't cross. In every class, we explore the whys behind our values and biases. It's not as simple as dictating right from wrong, and it's so rewarding to see nearly universal values arise around the concept of the greater good.

They work at getting there. One of my favorite classroom pivots in discussions begins with, "Now, let me complicate it for you ... "

Before COVID-19, a common discussion involved how much one should endure for an employer. At first, students almost universally agreed they would leave a job if their boss asked them to violate their values.

Let me complicate it for you, I'd say: You're a parent with children to house and feed.

The discussion becomes more nuanced.

Let me further complicate it for you: You're a single parent, the sole provider.

Their groans are good-natured, and they are up for the debate. It is an honor to watch them help one another grow as they explore what they owe themselves and their world.

With COVID-19, we've pivoted again. How do they advocate for themselves and their co-workers? What is the appropriate response to bosses who don't care about their safety and angry customers who are wiling to put them at risk? How do they say no to loved ones? As one student put it: "I tell her, 'No, Grandma. I can't see you now because I love you and I want you to stay alive.'"

They sort out what it means to be a responsible person in the time of COVID-19, one discussion at a time. By the end of the semester, they're brainstorming family dialogues and workplace solutions because they care about one another.

We can judge those students lining up at bars in college towns across the country. Or we can ask how we are failing them. We can engage in conversations that help them find the best version of themselves, and hope they hold it against us for taking so long.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University's school of journalism. She is the author of two non-fiction books, including "...and His Lovely Wife," which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. She is also the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, "The Daughters of Erietown." To find out more about Connie Schultz (schultz.connie@gmail.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

It’s Time To Free Students From Debt

It’s Time To Free Students From Debt

Butch Hancock, one of Austin’s finest singer-songwriters, grew up in the Texas Panhandle, out among dry-land farmers and strict fundamentalist Christians. Butch once told me that he felt he’d been permanently scarred in his vulnerable teen years by the local culture’s puritanical preaching on sexual propriety: “They told us that sex is filthy, obscene, wicked, and beastly — and that we should save it for someone we love.”

Today, America’s higher education complex approaches students with the same sort of convoluted logic that guided Butch’s sex education: “A college degree is the key to prosperity for both you and your country, so it’s essential,” lectures the hierarchy to the neophytes. “But we’ll make it hard to get and often not worth the getting.” Touted as a necessity, but priced like a luxury, many degree programs are mediocre or worse — predatory loan scams that hustle aspiring students into deep debt and poverty.

On both a human level and in terms of our national interest, that is seriously twisted. Nonetheless, it’s our nation’s de facto educational policy, promulgated and enforced by a cabal of ideologues and profiteers, including Washington politicos, most state governments, college CEOs, Wall Street financiers and debt-collection corporations. What we have is a shameful ethical collapse. These self-serving interests have intentionally devalued education from an essential public investment in the common good to just another commodity.

Back in the olden days of 1961, I attended the University of North Texas. At this public school, I was blessed with good teachers, a student body of working-class kids (most, like me, were the first in their families to go to college) and an educational culture focused on enabling us to become socially useful citizens. All of this cost me under $800 a year (about $6,250 in today’s dollars) — including living expenses! With close-to-free tuition and a part-time job, I could afford to get a good education, gain experience in everything from work to civic activism, make useful connections, graduate in four years, and obtain a debt-free start in life. We just assumed that’s what college was supposed to be.

It still ought to be, but for most students today, it’s not even close. In the U.S., tuition and fees charged by public four-year colleges and universities average more than $20,000 per year. For a private four-year college, it’s more than double that amount. Even public two-year colleges cost around $11,000 per year.

The nation’s fastest growing provider of higher education is unfortunately also the worst: private, for-profit schools. While a few deliver an honest educational product, honesty is not a business model embraced by most of these sprawling, predatory chains largely owned by Wall Street.

To achieve the Wall Street imperative of goosing up stock prices and maximizing profits, this educational sector routinely applies the full toolkit of corporate thievery, including false advertising, high-pressure sales tactics, bait-and-switch scams, legal dodges, political protection and outright lying. Rather than educating students and broadening life’s possibilities, many for-profit colleges have bankrupted hundreds of thousands of students. Worse, many of these “schools” prey on struggling, low-income workers desperately hoping a degree will provide a toehold in the middle class.

To say there are lots of horror stories about private, for-profit colleges gouging students is like saying there are lots of ouchies in a bramble patch. A profusion of books, articles, reports, investigations, and lawsuits, as well as websites such as My ITT Experience, document the toll.

You might ask, “If they’re so awful, how do they stay in business?” The old-fashioned way: By lavishly spreading money around to the right people. And since most of their revenue comes from taxpayers, it’s actually your money they’re spreading.

“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife,” said American philosopher and education reformer John Dewey. It’s time we give birth to a new of debt-free democracy. Put a tiny tax on the billions of daily, automated transactions by speculators, and more than enough money will come into the public coffers to free up higher education for all. For information, check out United States Students Association (http://www.usstudents.org).

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Kevin Creamer

How A Little-Known Education Office Has Forced Far-Reaching Changes To Campus Sex Assault Probes

How A Little-Known Education Office Has Forced Far-Reaching Changes To Campus Sex Assault Probes

By David G. Savage and Timothy M. Phelps, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — For the last four years, a little-known civil rights office in the U.S. Department of Education has forced far-reaching changes in how the nation’s colleges and universities police, prosecute and punish sexual assaults on campus.

With a strong mandate from President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, the office’s lawyers have redefined campus sexual assault as a federal civil rights issue, changed the standard by which allegations must be judged and publicized the names of a growing number of schools under investigation for allegedly failing to respond properly to complaints of sexual misconduct.

“This is the first administration to call sexual violence a civil rights issue,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, a former ACLU lawyer in Los Angeles who, as assistant secretary of Education, heads the Office for Civil Rights and has brought the style of an aggressive litigator to the once-staid education post.

“We don’t treat rape and sexual assault as seriously as we should,” she said, citing surveys that found 1 in 5 women say they were victims of sexual assault or unwanted sexual contact in college. There is “a need to push the country forward.”

Members of Congress and activists who fight unwanted sexual incidents on campus have praised the effort. College administrators grudgingly admit that the ratcheting up of pressure has changed a status quo in which some schools allowed perpetrators to go unpunished while failing to provide safety or support for victims.

But what some faculty, administrators and judges call an unyielding and one-sided approach by the government has provoked a backlash. Two weeks ago, a judge in San Diego rebuked the University of California campus there for trampling the rights of an accused student.

“Some schools see OCR as a bully with enforcement powers,” said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, the lobby group for higher education.

“Universities are desperately trying to do the right thing, but these cases can be really difficult to resolve fairly. Often, you have two conflicting stories, no evidence, no witnesses, and it’s all combined with substance abuse.”

University officials, many of whom will speak about the subject only on condition of anonymity, complain of heavy-handed pressure from Washington and a growing bureaucracy.

Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California and a former prosecutor and secretary of homeland security, warned in an article in the Yale Law & Policy Review published online this month that “a cottage industry is being created” on campuses dedicated to handling tasks that fall outside the expertise of colleges and universities.

“Rather than pushing institutions to become surrogates for the criminal justice system,” she said, policymakers should ask if “more work should be done to improve that system’s handling and prosecution of sexual assault cases.”

Under pressure from the Office for Civil Rights, campuses are rushing to set up a parallel legal system to investigate and rule upon murky encounters that often involve inebriated students. They must decide within 60 days whether it is “more likely than not” that an alleged perpetrator was guilty. And they make those decisions without many of the legal protections associated with a criminal trial.

The new procedures vary from school to school, but according to Harvard Law School professor Janet Halley and other critics, many do not allow the accused to know details of accusations against them, to question accusers, or to have lawyers participate in hearings. Many also allow only limited appeals of rulings by a campus administrator or outside expert.

The punishments can be an expulsion and a permanent notation on a student’s transcript, potentially life-altering penalties.

Critics call those moves dangerous procedural short circuits that have resulted in serious injustice.

“It’s tragic what the federal government has done,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, a civil rights activist and professor at Harvard Law School. “They are creating a backlash against the very cause they are fighting for.”

Bartholet and 27 other members of the Harvard law faculty objected publicly in October to a new university policy on sexual harassment and violence, adopted in the face of an investigation by the Office for Civil Rights.

But Lhamon’s tough approach has won strong support, driven by accounts of mistreatment from assault survivors such as Dana Bolger, who graduated from Amherst College last year and co-founded a group to advocate for victims.

“On my campus alone, students who experienced sexual or dating violence were discouraged from reporting, denied counseling and academic accommodations, and pressured to take time off,” Bolger said last month at a Senate committee hearing. “When I reported abuse to my school, I was told I should drop out, go home and take care of myself, and return when my rapist graduated.”

Lhamon and her colleagues say campuses need to quickly investigate complaints of sexual violence and reach a “prompt and equitable resolution,” regardless of whether a crime has been reported to police. A student should not have to attend class or live in a college dormitory with a person who assaulted him or her during the often-lengthy period that a criminal investigation would take, they say.

Law professors at several universities have objected to the department’s insistence that campus officials judge sexual-assault complaints based on the “preponderance of the evidence,” a legal standard that’s much easier to meet than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” employed in criminal cases.

Critics say that in many cases, particularly those in which both parties were drunk and there were no other witnesses, schools are being pressured to reach a conclusion where it is impossible to know the truth with any certainty.

“When the case is ambiguous, when the memories are clouded by alcohol consumption or time, we shouldn’t be punishing people,” said Halley, a self-described feminist once responsible for investigating such accusations at Stanford University.

“I’m afraid that’s what we are doing, we are over-correcting,” Halley said. “The procedures that are being adopted are taking us back to pre-Magna Carta, pre-due-process procedures.”

The Education Department’s authority to push for big changes in the way colleges and universities handle sexual assaults stems from Title IX of the federal education law, an act best known for spurring a revolution in women’s sports. The law says that colleges and universities that receive federal money — as nearly all of them do — cannot discriminate “on the basis of sex.”

In 2011, the civil rights office sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to college officials telling them that “acts of sexual violence” are sex discrimination “prohibited by Title IX.”

The number of colleges and universities under investigation for their handling of sexual assault complaints has grown steadily, reaching 129 as of this month, double the number from last year.

They include many of California’s most prominent universities, including UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and Stanford. Chapman University in Orange County was recently added to the list. Also on the list are Harvard, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago and many top state universities.

Education Department officials can threaten these universities with the loss of billions of dollars in federal funds, a powerful, although rarely used, weapon.

“All the universities are being stampeded to go along. They’re afraid. There is a lot of money on the line, and they fear being investigated,” said University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephanos Bibas. He was one of 16 Penn law professors who signed a letter criticizing the civil rights office for having exerted “improper pressure upon universities to adopt procedures that do not afford fundamental fairness.”

Lhamon, however, told the Senate panel that “voluntary compliance” is working.

“Our enforcement has consistently resulted in institutions agreeing to take the steps necessary to come into compliance,” she said, “and ensure that students can learn in safe, nondiscriminatory environments.”

Photo: UCLA, whose library is pictured, is one of the many schools that are under investigation for how they handled sexual assault claims by students. CampusGrotto via Flickr