USNews.com: America's Best Colleges 2008

Economic Diversity Among All Liberal Arts Colleges

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. 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 2005-2006 data on grant recipients collected by the U.S. Dept. of Education and fall 2005 total undergraduate enrollment collected from the colleges themselves.

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