Economic Diversity Among the Top 25 Ranked Schools National Universities

Economic diversity has received growing attention in higher education, particularly at elite schools that haven't traditionally enrolled large numbers of low-income students or students from low-income families. This table shows the percentage of undergraduates receiving federal Pell grants for low-income students among the top 25 ranked schools in the 2012 U.S. News Best Colleges rankings. The proportion of students on Pell grants, which are most often given to undergrads with family incomes under $20,000, isn't a perfect measure of an institution's efforts to achieve economic diversity: A college might enroll a large number of students just above the Pell cutoff, for instance, and percentages at public universities may reflect the wide variation from state to state in the number of qualified low-income students.

Still, many experts say that Pell figures are the best available gauge of how many low-income undergrads there are on a given campus. Pell grant percentages were calculated using 2009-2010 school year data on the number of Pell grant recipients at each school collected by the U.S. Dept. of Education and given to U.S. News and fall 2009 total undergraduate enrollment collected from the colleges themselves by U.S. News.