A steep and sustained decline in federal Pell Grant funding has driven more than half a million students out of colleges and universities across the South over the past decade, with Black and low-income students disproportionately affected, according to a new research brief.
The report, “The Widening College Access Gap,” released jointly by the Southern Education Foundation and the University of Alabama’s Education Policy Center, reveals that federal spending on the Pell Grant program fell from $36 billion to $26 billion between the 2011–12 and 2021–22 academic years—a drop of nearly 28 percent. During that period, the number of Pell recipients in 17 Southern states declined by 23 percent.
The findings offer one of the clearest links yet between the erosion of federal financial aid and the enrollment crisis plaguing public institutions throughout the region, where more than 500,000 students have vanished from campus rolls.
“Pell cuts translate directly into enrollment losses,” said Art Dunning, former president of the Albany State University in Georgia. “This is critical research that demands attention.”
The enrollment decline has been particularly severe among Black students, whose access to higher education has been reversely correlated with the shrinking value of the Pell Grant. Once covering more than three-quarters of the cost of attendance at a public four-year university, the grant now pays less than 30 percent.
Researchers attribute the plummeting enrollment to inconsistent federal funding and deep state budget cuts, which have combined to price low-income students out of higher education even as the economic returns of a college degree grow.
Raymond C. Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, said the organization partnered with the Education Policy Center because of “their deep knowledge of postsecondary education issues facing the South and our nation.”
The brief is the first in a series of publications examining higher education access in the South. Future reports will analyze state funding for public colleges, shortages of STEM graduates of color, faculty diversity, and historical enrollment trends since 1970.
In response to the findings, researchers are urging federal policymakers to make Pell Grant funding mandatory—rather than subject to the political whims of annual appropriations—and calling on states to better align financial aid programs with the needs of their most vulnerable students.
Without such changes, the authors warn, the promise of affordable higher education will continue to fade across the nation’s most populous and rapidly changing region—leaving an entire generation behind.