Low-Income Graduate Students Are Invisible in Policy Discussions—and Federal Data Are to Blame
The Department of Education has recently updated the College Scorecard—a public-facing tool that provides prospective students with information about the cost of a program, their potential debt loads, and their likely earnings post-graduation. These data can also influence policies that have major impacts on higher education. But low-income graduate students are nowhere to be found in the data.
Tracking how low-income students fare is critical to making sure our policies serve all students. Low-income students serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine, offering an early warning of failing systems. They are also most likely to be saddled with debt they can’t repay if they are unable to complete their education, or if their education does not offer the expected boost in their income.
Most low-income undergraduates receive Pell Grants, which researchers can use as a proxy to identify them, track their progress, and determine if colleges and universities are doing what they should to ensure these students succeed. Research on Pell Grant recipients offers a fair amount of information about how low-income students are faring in higher education. This information can be used by the wider public, taxpayers, and policymakers to identify which institutions are providing the best ROI to their most vulnerable students.
But Pell Grants are not available to graduate students. For researchers, that means that there is no easy way to identify low-income graduate students, track which programs these students attend, or analyze their outcomes using federal data.
Periodic survey data indicate that low-income students are enrolling in graduate programs and that some of them are taking on high levels of debt to pursue their education goals. In 2021, the Council of Graduate Schools estimated that 46% of first-year graduate and professional students had been Pell Grant recipients and that those students were more likely to enter graduate school with education debt than non-Pell recipients.
Yet for data collection and research purposes, the system seems to assume that a student’s income status no longer matters once they enter graduate school. As a former Pell Grant recipient a year out from getting his PhD, I can assure you that in real life, low-income status doesn’t change that easily.
Graduate students can’t access Pell Grants, but they can take out government loans. According to a Government Accountability Office report, so many graduate students are defaulting on their federal loans that the government—and taxpayers—are losing money on them. Perhaps this is because, as new Third Way research suggests, many graduate degrees fail to boost earnings beyond a bachelor's degree. Despite this, the National Center for Education Statistics estimates there will be a 6% increase in graduate school enrollment by 2031.
All of this comes at a time when the Department of Education has reported that the majority of the national student loan portfolio will soon be graduate student debt. These findings threaten a perfect storm that could damage students, institutions, and taxpayers—but we don’t have the data to measure where that storm it will hit, how hard it will be, or what we can do to stop it.
It has never been more critical for the federal government, researchers, and prospective graduate students to know about the quality of graduate programs and what happens to the low-income students who enroll in them. And there are relatively simple changes that the Department of Education and Congress can take to improve the situation.
First, the Department of Education and Congress should require institutions to collect and report disaggregated graduate enrollment data at the program level. Currently, we don’t know who is enrolling in programs and what their outcomes are.
Second, they should require institutions to report borrowing data for their graduate students. Currently, we have no way to determine how much a graduate student borrows for a program, what type of loans they are taking out, and what their repayment rates are.
Third, they should continue collecting program-level earnings data for graduate students and make sure all earnings data are disaggregated. Federal data only include median earnings for a small share of graduate programs, limiting our understanding of socioeconomic inequities. Expanding the availability of earnings data will enable us to identify low-income graduate students across programs and analyze outcomes based on multiple demographics such as race, gender, and class.
These three changes will allow the federal government to see which programs are enrolling low-income graduate students, assess how well they are delivering value for those students, and create responsible metrics to protect low-income borrowers and hold institutions accountable. In light of other reporting requirements, these changes would not require a significant additional administrative burden. In fact, there’s a good chance that some of this information is already being collected internally by schools, even though it’s not currently required to report.
We are in the middle of a student debt conversation that is polarizing American politics. That conversation is limited by our lack of reliable data about low-income graduate students. These students pursue advanced degrees with the belief that those credentials will assist them in achieving the American dream. They are trusting the system and banking on their degrees paying off so they can pay their bills, support a family, or simply eat better—and we owe it to them to make sure their experiences are not ignored.
