The Obama Administration’s Education Department recently announced a major change to Pell Grants. It released a lineup of 44 colleges that will be eligible next year for its pilot program to give Pell Grants to high school students in dual enrollment programs. The institutions, mostly community colleges, will receive $20 million, and the program is expected to reach approximately 10,000 high school students.
Dual enrollment, in which high school students take courses at a local college to gain college credit, is popular. According to estimates from 2010 (latest available), about 1.2 million high school students took part in a dual enrollment program, representing about 8% of total high school enrollment at the time. Some 46% of colleges, including 96% of two-year public colleges, taught high school students through dual enrollment programs.
The Administration’s initiative is only a pilot program, and does not expand Pell Grants to all 1.2 million students in dual enrollment programs. But should it? There are two economic questions to be answered here.
First, does dual enrollment meaningfully increase student achievement? In other words, does taking a college class while in high school increase your chance of going on to college, getting higher marks, and graduating? This question is difficult to study, because students who decide to use dual enrollment might be significantly different from those who do not. Even comparisons that try to control for various student characteristics (such as family income, race and school district) likely miss factors such as individual motivation or parental engagement that researchers simply cannot quantify.
Cecilia Speroni, in a report for the National Center for Postsecondary Research, addressed this problem by comparing students just above and below the eligibility cutoff for a Florida dual enrollment program. Since a GPA of 2.99 is not terribly different from a GPA of 3.01, a substantial divergence in outcomes between the former students (who were not eligible for dual enrollment) and the latter (who were) might be attributed to the program.
Her results showed that most dual enrollment courses did not significantly affect students’ likelihood of college enrollment or graduation, with the exception of an advanced algebra course. This is not to suggest that dual enrollment is worthless—far from it—but it certainly does not work for everyone.
The second question is, if dual enrollment is worthwhile, will expanding Pell Grants substantially increase its usage, or simply subsidize those who would have used it anyway? The evidence on whether Pell Grants have increased college enrollment in the traditional sense is mixed. Colleges also tend to raise prices when federal student aid becomes more generous. If that effect carries over to dual enrollment, it could dampen the students’ incentive to use the program. Evidence from the pilot program might help answer this question.
There is also a question of legality. Under the Higher Education Act, students enrolled in high school are prohibited from receiving Pell Grants. While no one is likely to challenge the pilot program, universal Pell Grant expansion to dual enrollment programs will almost certainly require congressional approval. The Administration cannot simply repurpose funds for uses that Congress has explicitly forbidden.
If expansion is pursued, it presents an opportunity to reform Pell Grants more broadly. Currently, the system doles out cash directly to colleges on an annual basis, with a maximum award per year, which is capped at six years. This is highly conducive to the traditional college model: start school, work toward a degree for two or four years, and graduate. But programs such as dual enrollment, along with competency-based education and other innovations, do not neatly fit into the model that Pell Grants’ framers had in mind.
Why not turn Pell Grants into a system more akin to education savings accounts? The government could simply give qualifying students a set amount of money (calibrated so it doesn’t cost more than the current system) that they may use for whichever approved educational expense(s) they desire. High school students could use the funds for dual enrollment, but would then have less available for educational expenses down the road. If dual enrollment is worth that tradeoff—and the evidence suggests that it is not for some—students should be welcome to use Pell Grants to pay for it.
Of course, greater student autonomy will not solve many of American higher education’s deeper problems, which include low graduation rates, a lack of competition and high prices. But more flexibility on how to use Pell Grants—which, for better or worse, are a central component of our mostly-nationalized higher education finance system—could provide a welcome boost to student choice and educational innovation.
This column originally appeared on Forbes.
Preston Cooper is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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