High Performing Pell Institutions: Identifying and Exploring Colleges and Universities with High Low-Income Student Success

Higher education serves as an unequal pathway to upward mobility, where students from low-income backgrounds are less likely to enroll and earn a degree. We develop an empirical model that systematically identifies institutions across multiple measures of success at serving students from lower-income backgrounds. We identify 149 diverse “High Performing Pell” institutions, having high Pell graduation rates, low access and attainment gaps between Pell and non-Pell students, and relatively high earnings after graduation. We also show that traditional quantitative measures do a poor job of explaining this performance, underscoring how observable and unobservable factors combine to develop supportive environments for marginalized students. Our work unifies prior conceptualizations of what drives Pell recipients’ outcomes and serves as an innovative approach to identify postsecondary exemplars. We provide a foundation for further multi-modal inquiry into institutions that have successfully reduced or eliminated socioeconomic attainment gaps worthy of attention by policymakers, practitioners, and funders.