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Reinstatement of Pell Grant Eligibility for Incarcerated Students: Evolving Cultural Perspectives on Educational Access
Image by Charles DeLoye via Unsplash
Numerous key provisions of the 2021 FAFSA Simplification Act went into effect July 1, 2023, reinstating Pell Grant eligibility for students incarcerated in adult correctional and juvenile justice facilities.1 The statute overturned a Pell Grant prohibition that had been in place since 1994. That year, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (also known as the “1994 Crime Bill”).2 In addition to expanding federal funding for police forces and prisons—among other anti-crime initiatives—the Crime Bill significantly restricted access to federal aid for students completing degree programs during their sentences.3
This recent reinstatement suggests that American perspectives on prisoners’ rights and public safety have softened from the “tough-on-crime” ideologies that gave rise to the 1994 Crime Bill. The Pell Grant program’s revival invites further inquiry into additional methods legislatures can employ to counteract the carceral system’s retributive aims. To be sure, programs like the Pell Grant do little to lessen the essential brutality of the U.S. carceral network. At the same time, they are piecemeal measures nonetheless integral to holistic re-entry support systems. Access to federal student aid can create new opportunities for professional development and increased employment security upon re-entry. On the path toward achieving longer-term goals such as system-wide prison reform or abolition, pragmatic policies like Pell Grant expansion can mitigate some of the harms produced by carceral institutions in the meantime.
The Pell Grant was first established in 1972 under the Higher Education Act Amendments.4 Originally named the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (BEOG), the Pell is a need-based grant for students pursuing an undergraduate education. The award may be applied to both two-year and four-year degree programs. Additionally, the amount of the grant is scaled so that eligible students with higher need receive greater aid awards, up to a predetermined annual maximum. Presently, it is the “single largest source of federal grant aid supporting postsecondary education students,” serving 6.1 million undergraduate students in FY2021.5 The program primarily serves students from lower-income backgrounds, and, unlike student loans, the Pell Grant does not need to be repaid.
In its original form, the Pell Grant was available to incarcerated as well as non-incarcerated students, mandating no express bars based on one’s criminal history.6 Over the next several decades, the advent of the “war on crime” precipitated a gradual tightening of not only Pell Grant eligibility, but federal student aid at large. Following the enactment of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, state and federal courts received discretion to deny financial aid (and other federal benefits) to individuals with certain trafficking offenses on their record.7 Eight years later, the signing of the Crime Bill categorically ended all incarcerated students’ eligibility to receive federal financial aid.8
As a result, incarcerated students no longer had access to federal student loans and scholarships like the Pell Grant. In contrast to the standardized interest rates affixed to federal loans, students seeking degree funding through private loans typically encounter higher and more volatile interest rates.9 Moreover, because these loans come from non-government sources, they are not eligible for initiatives like the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)10 or the Teacher Loan Forgiveness programs.11 Private lenders may also have more predatory lending practices because their loans receive less oversight than federal ones. These structural maladies affect all undergraduate private loan borrowers, not just those in carceral institutions. To avoid this debt burden, inmates who would have been able to enroll in eligible degree programs with little or no out-of-pocket cost under the pre-1994 regime might have chosen to forgo pursuing degrees altogether.
Because Pell Grants were specifically designed with lower-income students in mind, the 1994 termination of this program for incarcerated students was especially devastating. During the immediately preceding academic year, approximately twenty-three thousand students in correctional institutions were Pell recipients.12 Pell recipients completing degree programs in carceral facilities were only 2 percent of the total US inmate population.13 Nationwide, these students composed less than 1 percent of all Pell awardees, or approximately one out of every five hundred.14 In other words, only six cents out of every ten Pell dollars were funding incarcerated students’ postsecondary education.15
Accordingly, a Government Accountability Office report analyzing data from the 1993–94 academic year found that “grants to incarcerated students do not affect grants to other needy students.”16 Non-incarcerated students who had already been denied a Pell Grant would not then become eligible if the program ended inmate eligibility.17 Existing Pell grantees would also not be likely to see their annual awards increase by more than $3 if the proposed Crime Bill provisions were to pass.18 Nevertheless, the Crime Bill struck down Pell eligibility for these twenty-three thousand students in 1994. Between 1994 and the early 2010s, little progress was made in terms of reopening the door on federal aid.
However, in 2015, the implementation of the Second Chance Pell Experiment renewed hopes that a full reinstatement of the program could be attainable in the near future.19 The program awarded a modest sum of 4,960 Pell Grants across fifty-three eligible prison education programs during the 2016–17 academic year.20 Of course, the quantity of grants awarded that year was merely a fraction of the tens of thousands last awarded in 1994. Furthermore, the number of participating prison education programs was also far fewer than what it was during the program’s last cycle. Yet, two decades after what seemed like the definitive end of the Pell Grant program, the U.S. Department of Education surprised many Americans with the reintroduction of a once deeply divisive initiative.
Second Chance Pell succeeded in enrolling approximately seventeen thousand students in carceral institutions within its first three years.21 By the end of its first four years, the program helped over seven thousand students earn bachelor’s degrees, associate degrees, or technical certificates or diplomas.22 As of April 2022, over two hundred educational institutions are eligible to participate in the program.23 In addition, the Second Chance Pell initiative included a provision to help incarcerated students with defaulted loans return to “good standing” status for the purposes of repayment.24 The program also permitted students in carceral facilities to consolidate their loans in an effort to help them exit default more easily.25 In expanding Second Chance Pell, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona reaffirmed a need for the federal government to invest in incarcerated students’ “second chances to build a future.”26
This ethos is at the heart of the recently enacted FAFSA Simplification Act, which fully reinstated Pell Grant eligibility for students in carceral institutions beginning July 1, 2023. The provisions affecting incarcerated students are actually just a small part of the broad-sweeping statute: The act mainly aimed to streamline the FAFSA application process and modify how certain aid awards were calculated.27 Beginning with the 2024–25 academic year, more students are expected to become eligible for the Pell Grant as a result of changes in the formula used to calculate eligibility.28 The act’s final draft comes after many years of public criticism about the complexity of applying for aid and the opacity surrounding how aid amounts are determined.29 Overall, the FAFSA Simplification Act’s enactment by Congress was a sizable triumph for advocates of educational equity. Regardless of one’s conviction history, access to educational development can have a positive impact on socioeconomic mobility.
Research on the links between educational attainment (both in and beyond prison education programs) and recidivism suggests that these programs can have a mitigating effect on the likelihood that a formerly incarcerated student re-enters the carceral system.30 Beyond lowering recidivism, prison education programs can also confer positive qualitative benefits in terms of developing prosocial relationships and networks.31 From an economic perspective, the credentials earned within such programs better prepare students to compete in the job market upon graduation. Many jurisdictions may limit the kinds of employment an individual can occupy if they have convictions on their record: For example, nationwide, approximately eight hundred “government-regulated, private occupations” explicitly prohibit the hiring of justice-involved candidates.32 Additionally, the slow movement of “clean slate” legislation in certain states means that past convictions can remain an obstacle in securing employment even years after a sentence is served in full.
Postsecondary credentials can help counterbalance some of the bias that formerly incarcerated individuals face in securing employment, but they still leave many problems unaddressed. Challenges in combating the stigma of criminal convictions reaffirm the need to consider Pell Grant awards as a starting point for achieving greater objectives within re-entry support. For example, increased access to expungement and sealing should be pursued parallel to the expansion of federal aid resources for incarcerated students.33 These programs essentially erase past convictions after a certain number of years have passed, depending on the jurisdiction. States like Connecticut have even automated the process for certain felonies and misdemeanors, eliminating the need for expungement petitions to be manually submitted.34 Furthermore, the growing “ban the box” movement is another avenue for re-entry support that may help formerly incarcerated individuals overcome prejudice in the hiring process: These statutes require employers to remove job application questions that inquire about a candidate’s criminal history.35 In tandem, these policy changes can ease re-entry and destigmatize prior convictions.
Indeed, skeptics are still not convinced that federal funding should be invested in the educational development of incarcerated students. Perhaps they feel that some resources are too great to confer upon people who have been convicted of crimes. Voting eligibility, employment in certain industries, and even admission to law school have historically been just a few of the many opportunities people can lose access to in the wake of a conviction. Whether access to higher education is a privilege or a right remains, at its core, a debate over normative values. The quantifiable data on recidivism and socioeconomic mobility does point toward the conclusion that prison education funding generates broad community benefit, however.36 What’s more, a closer examination of the Pell Grant’s origins reveals that reinstatement of eligibility for incarcerated students is far from a novel or revolutionary act. At its inception, the Pell Grant program was never about the “deservingness” of a student seeking federal aid. What mattered was a student’s own financial need and the desire to pursue postsecondary education.
The full reinstatement of Pell Grant eligibility for students in correctional institutions marks a significant cultural shift. Five decades after the inception of the Pell Grant program, it has survived numerous amendments and revisions to finally return to a state more closely reflecting its original commitment to educational access regardless of one’s criminal history. Whereas legislatures of previous decades openly embraced a policing- and imprisonment-oriented approach to crime, the American public at large seems to be more open to ideas that would have appeared too radical during the 1980s and ’90s. A turn away from the primarily retributive model of punishment will achieve greater long-term objectives in community flourishing and pave a path toward decarceration’s ultimate goal.
1 FAFSA Simplification Act of 2021, Title VII, Division FF of Pub. L. No. 116–260.
2 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Pub. L. No. 103–322.
3 Id. § 20101.
4 Higher Education Amendments of 1972, Pub. L. No. 92-318, 86 Stat. 235.
5 Cassandria Dortch, Cong. Research Serv., R45418, Federal Pell Grant Program of the Higher Education Act: Primer (2023).
6 Bradley D. Custer, Federal Financial Aid for College Students With Criminal Convictions, Center for American Progress (last updated Jan. 12, 2021).
7 Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, Pub. L. 100–690, 102 Stat. 4181.
8 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Pub. L. No. 103–322.
9 Rajeev Darolia, Strategies to Test for Private Student Loan Discrimination, 40 Journal of Education Finance 103, 103–05 (2014); Ayelet Sheffy, How Private Lenders Have Left Millions of College Students with No Hope for the Future, Business Insider, Aug. 21, 2023.
10 Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, 34 C.F.R. § 685.219 (2010).
11 Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program, 34 C.F.R. § 685.217 (2022).
12 U.S. Gov’t Accountability Office, GAO-HEHS-94-224R, Pell Grants for Prison Inmates (1994); Bradley D. Custer, Federal Financial Aid for College Students With Criminal Convictions, Center for American Progress.
13 GAO, Pell Grants for Prison Inmates, 3.
14 Id.
15 Id.
16 Id. at 5.
17 Id. at 5–6.
18 Id.
19 Ruth Delaney and Chase Montagnet, Second Chance Pell: A Snapshot of the First Three Years, Vera Institute of Justice (April 2020).
20 Id.
21 Id.
22 Ashley A. Smith, Two More California Universities to Offer ‘Second Chance’ Pell Grants to Incarcerated People, EdSource, Apr. 26, 2022.
23 U.S. Dep’t of Educ., U.S. Department of Education Announces Expansion of Second Chance Pell Experiment and Actions to Help Incarcerated Individuals Resume Educational Journeys and Reduce Recidivism, Apr. 26, 2022.
24 Id.
25 Id.
26 Id.
27 Benjamin Collins & Cassandria Dortch, Cong. Research Serv. R46909, The FAFSA Simplification Act (2022).
28 Id.
29 Id. at 1–2.
30 Lori L. Hall, Correctional Education and Recidivism: Toward a Tool for Reduction, 66 Journal of Correctional Education 4, 4–8 (2015); Brady Duke, A Meta-Analysis Comparing Educational Attainment Prior to Incarceration and Recidivism Rates in Relation to Correctional Education, 69 Journal of Correctional Education 44, 48–54 (2018); Elizabeth Westrope, Employment Discrimination on the Basis of Criminal History: Why an Anti-Discrimination Statute Is a Necessary Remedy, 108 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 367 (2018).
31 Emily Pelletier & Douglas Evans, Beyond Recidivism: Positive Outcomes from Higher Education Programs in Prisons, 70 Journal of Correctional Education (1974-) 49, 50–52 (2019).
32 Sandra Susan Smith & Jonathan Simon, Exclusion and Extraction: Criminal Justice Contact and the Reallocation of Labor, 6 RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 1, 5 (2020).
33 Jeffrey Selbin, Justin McCrary & Joshua Epstein, Unmarked? Criminal Record Clearing and Employment Outcomes, 108 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-) 1, 3–19 (2018).
34 Lori L. Hall, Correctional Education and Recidivism: Toward a Tool for Reduction, 66 Journal of Correctional Education 4 (2015); Brady Duke, A Meta-Analysis Comparing Educational Attainment Prior to Incarceration and Recidivism Rates in Relation to Correctional Education, 69 Journal of Correctional Education 44 (2018); U.S. Dep’t of Educ., U.S. Department of Education Announces Expansion of Second Chance Pell Experiment and Actions to Help Incarcerated Individuals Resume Educational Journeys and Reduce Recidivism, Apr. 26, 2022.
35 National Conference of State Legislatures, Ban the Box: Introduction.
36 Hall, Lori L., Correctional Education and Recidivism: Toward a Tool for Reduction, 66 Journal of Correctional Education 4 (2015); Duke, Brady, A Meta-Analysis Comparing Educational Attainment Prior to Incarceration and Recidivism Rates in Relation to Correctional Education, 69 Journal of Correctional Education 44 (2018); U.S. Dep’t of Educ., U.S. Department of Education Announces Expansion of Second Chance Pell Experiment and Actions to Help Incarcerated Individuals Resume Educational Journeys and Reduce Recidivism, Apr. 26, 2022.