Best Colleges: Economic Diversity Among Top-Ranked Schools: National Universities
Economic diversity has received growing attention in higher education, particularly at elite schools that haven't traditionally enrolled large numbers of low-income students or students from low-income families. This table shows the percentage of undergraduates receiving federal Pell grants for low-income students. The proportion of students on Pell grants, which are most often given to undergrads with family incomes under $20,000, isn't a perfect measure of an institution's efforts to achieve economic diversity: A college might enroll a large number of students just above the Pell cutoff, for instance, and percentages at public universities may reflect the wide variation from state to state in the number of qualified low-income students. Still, many experts say that Pell figures are the best available gauge of how many low-income undergrads there are on a given campus. Pell grant percentages were calculated using 2007-2008 data on grant recipients collected by the U.S. Dept. of Education and given to U.S. News and fall 2007 total undergraduate enrollment collected from the colleges themselves by U.S. News.
| U.S. News rank: | Percent of undergraduates receiving Pell grants: | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| University of California--Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA | 24 | 35% | |
| University of California--Berkeley Berkeley, CA | 21 | 32% | |
| Columbia University New York, NY | 8 | 17% | |
| University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA | 26 | 16% | |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA | 4 | 15% | |
| Dartmouth College Hanover, NH | 11 | 15% | |
| Harvard University Cambridge, MA | 1 | 14% | |
| Cornell University Ithaca, NY | 15 | 14% | |
| Emory University Atlanta, GA | 17 | 14% | |
| Stanford University Stanford, CA | 4 | 13% | |
| University of Chicago Chicago, IL | 8 | 13% | |
| Brown University Providence, RI | 16 | 12% | |
| Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN | 17 | 12% | |
| California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CA | 4 | 12% | |
| Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA | 22 | 11% | |
| Rice University Houston, TX | 17 | 11% | |
| University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA | 4 | 11% | |
| Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD | 14 | 10% | |
| Northwestern University Evanston, IL | 12 | 10% | |
| Duke University Durham, NC | 10 | 10% | |
| Georgetown University Washington, DC | 23 | 10% | |
| Princeton University Princeton, NJ | 1 | 10% | |
| Yale University New Haven, CT | 3 | 10% | |
| University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN | 20 | 9% | |
| University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA | 24 | 8% | |
| Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis, MO | 12 | 7% | |
advertisement
