Research

This brief examines student and alumni understandings of federal student aid. Specifically, this brief explores their perceptions and understandings of the Pell Grant, eligibility for the Pell Grant—including lifetime eligibility used (LEU) limits—and how these perceptions might influence students' postsecondary educational journeys. 

This research brief draws upon three years of data collection through a national mixed-methods project, Exploring the Experiences of Participants in Second Chance Pell. It highlights the perspectives of Pell recipients enrolled at four institutions of higher education participating in the federal experiment. Specifically, it focuses on students’ perceptions of the costs of postsecondary education and the Pell Grant. Overall, students report that they incur many expenses to participate in postsecondary education that are not covered by Pell. 

This research brief draws upon three years of data collection through a national mixed-methods project, Exploring the Experiences of Participants in Second Chance Pell. It draws from the perspectives of higher education administrators and practitioners participating in the federal experiment. Specifically, it focuses on their perceptions and experiences as to whether the Pell Grant adequately covers the costs of providing high-quality postsecondary education in prison. Unquestionably, administrators and practitioners report that the Pell Grant alone is insufficient. In particular, they remark that various costs associated with the program cannot be covered by Pell, including one of their greatest needs: staff necessary to support existing and prospective students. Consequently, personnel in this sample often take on responsibilities with the prison higher education program that fall outside of their contracted duties with the college or university. 

The Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative, launched in 2015, has already impacted the landscape of prison higher education by increasing the number of colleges and universities providing in-prison postsecondary education. This research brief draws upon three years of data collection through a national mixed-methods project, Exploring the Experiences of Participants in Second Chance Pell. Here, we include data collected from the staff at four higher education institutions in financial aid, admissions, and the registrar or related unit. The larger study focused on nine institutions participating in the Second Chance Pell Experiment. This brief focuses on a subset of four institutions that had the capacity to provide the research team with de-identified student data in a timely manner.

Launched in 2015, the Second Chance Pell Experiment allowed a select number of institutions of higher education to provide Pell Grants to incarcerated students. Seven years later, and on the cusp of Pell expansion, there are a few noteworthy impacts of the federal experiment:
» As of 2022, up to 200 institutions of higher education can participate in the federal experiment.
» Over 28,000 unduplicated students enrolled in postsecondary education through the Second Chance Pell Experiment from 2016 through 2021.
» Across the pilot’s first 2 years, institutions awarded approximately $35.6 million in Pell Grants to about 8,800 incarcerated students.

A lesser known yet critical area of knowledge and understanding is how, specifically, some incarcerated students are able to participate in the experiment and others are not. At the heart of this inquiry is certainly a question about college admissions, but one that is uniquely rooted in the context of equity and opportunity during incarceration. Until recently, the ways that incarcerated people became part of the experiment were largely unknown beyond anecdotal information from practitioners and participants. Consequently, serious questions about the Pell Grant in prison and issues of equity and access persist.

Exploring the Experiences of Participants in Second Chance Pell is a mixed-methods research study examining the implementation and facilitation of the Second Chance Pell Experiment commenced in 2019, and includes data collected from staff, students, and alumni affiliated with nine higher education institutions. This brief provides an introduction and executive summary for all reports included in the series, titled Pell Is Not Enough.

This study helps to explain how the use of the criminal history box on college applications and the supplemental requirements and procedures that follow create barriers to higher education for otherwise qualified applicants. In this study, which focuses on the State University of New York (SUNY), we found that almost two out of every three applicants who disclosed a felony conviction were denied access to higher education, not because of a purposeful denial of their application but because they were driven out of the application process.

This report from the Community College Journal of Research and Practice summarizes results from a critical mixed-methods case study of a mid-sized urban community college district. The case study uses publicly available data to compare these colleges’ explicit commitment to access and opportunity with their investments in surveillance, security, and enclosure. The authors argue that a school-prison nexus, or SPN (similar to what many refer to as the school-to-prison pipeline), is enacted well beyond PK-12 schools, in and through higher education.

This paper presents preliminary findings from a survey SHEEO administered to its members in 2018. The paper is organized around three main categories: access, program delivery, and reentry of program participants into society.

This 50-state comparison provides a look at the specific criteria employed in the top two largest aid programs by state. It includes details about which state programs are linked to measuring need through the federally calculated Estimated Family Contribution (EFC) or purely family income.

This data brief summarizes results from the first six years of the Vera Institute of Justice's Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative (SCP), launched by the U.S. Department of Education in 2015.

In 2022, Ithaka S+R launched a nationwide survey that would help determine the national landscape for access to educational technology in prison education programs. The survey asked respondents about student access to technology in their higher education in prison program, collecting demographic information before focusing on four thematic areas: technological devices, learning management systems and software, network connection and internet access, and future technology plans. The findings from this survey are presented in this report.

Estimates of post-release economic effects of participation in prison-based general educational development (GED) programs using a panel of earnings records and a rich set of individual information from administrative data in the state of Florida.

Using data for a cohort of federal prison releasees, the hypothesis tested is that inmates who actively participate in education programs have a lower likelihood of recidivating, defined as a rearrest or parole revocation within 3 years after release, controlling for several background and post-release measures, including post-release employment. Results show that inmates who actively participate in education programs have a significantly lower likelihood of recidivating.

An abridged account of the keynote address at the 2013 National Conference on Higher Education in Prison at Saint Louis University, which focused on the power of prison higher education to bring about an end to this society’s grossly excessive reliance on incarceration.

Established in 2019, the Journal of Higher Education in Prison is the only open-access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes exclusively on topics and issues affecting the field of higher education in prison. Our goal is for the journal to serve as a tool to facilitate conversation on theory, praxis, and teaching and learning in prison.