Measuring Colleges' Success Graduating Low-Income Students

U.S. News is publishing an exclusive analysis of how well colleges and universities are succeeding at graduating low-income students compared with the graduation rate of the overall student body.

Measuring the success of students with Pell Grants, federal aid to students from low-income families, is one key goal of the president's proposed college rating plan. The plan will use measures such as graduation rates and the number of students receiving Pell Grants to identify "colleges that do the most to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds as well as colleges that are improving their performance," according to a release.

This listing, based on data that only U.S. News has collected, offers a preview of some of the outcomes that those developing the federal college rating plan need to consider.

The Pell Grant program most often serves undergraduates with family incomes of less than $20,000. Schools must disclose the graduation rates of students who received a Pell Grant, students who received a subsidized Stafford loan but not a Pell Grant, and students who received neither under the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2009.

These three separate graduation rates indicate if a college is successful in serving students from different income levels.

U.S. News collected these income-based graduation rate data for the fall 2006 entering class as part of our data collection for the 2014 Best Colleges rankings. This information, which U.S. News has collected since 2012 as part of its spring survey of colleges and universities, is not currently being collected by the U.S. Department of Education, so it is unlikely that those developing the federal college rating plan will be able to measure Pell Grant graduation rates separately.

The three separate graduation rates are not part of the 2014 Best Colleges rankings methodology, but this important outcome measure may be incorporated into the rankings model in future years.

In the analysis below, we have used this data to show which schools in the U.S. News National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges rankings categories are top performers, overperformers and underperformers when comparing the six-year graduation rate of their Pell Grant students with the six-year rate of the entire graduating class.

U.S. News has defined top-performing schools for this list as those with overall six-year graduation rates of 70 percent or higher and where Pell Grant students graduate at the same rate as the overall student body, plus or minus 1 percentage point. In other words, all the students at these schools -- no matter their income level -- are graduating at the same high level.

Those developing the federal college ratings will have to determine what methodology and benchmarks they will use to determine which colleges are overperforming and underperforming for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Of the 510 ranked schools in the National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges categories, 317 submitted information to U.S. News on both the entire fall 2006 student body graduation rate and the graduation rate of Pell Grant students for the fall 2006 entering class.

A number of schools ranked in the top 10 of their categories didn't give U.S. News their income-based graduation rate data: Harvard University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, Duke University, Dartmouth College, Williams College, Pomona College and Davidson College.

Top Performers

The table below shows the top performing schools in the National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges rankings categories, where Pell Grant students are graduating at close to the same, high graduation rates as the overall student body.

Overperformers

This table shows which National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges are graduating Pell Grant students at higher rates than the overall student body, and are thus overperforming.

Underperformers

This table shows which National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges graduate Pell Grant students at lower rates than the overall student body, and are thus underperforming.

*RNP denotes an institution that is ranked in the bottom one-fourth of its rankings category. U.S. News calculates a rank for the school but has decided not to publish it.

The graduation rate data above are correct as of Oct. 17, 2013.