Undergraduate enrollments in Florida’s colleges and universities have been declining since 2011. Enrollments should have been increasing. The K-12 education pipeline has produced a growing number of high school graduates year after year. The labor market continues to offer a million-dollar lifetime income premium to those with bachelor’s degrees over others with only high school diplomas.
Yet undergraduate enrollments declined. Enrollment declined from 991,372 students in 2011 to 797,303 a decade later. The decline was 194,069 students, or 19.6%. The decline has occurred among men and women, whites and blacks, and full-time and part-time enrollments. A growing share of college-age youth in Florida have decided not to attend college.
Money — or lack thereof — is what separates growing and declining college enrollments. Between 2011 and 2021 the number of undergraduates with federal Pell Grants, targeted on low-income, financially needy students, declined by 29.4%. The number of undergraduates without Pell Grants increased by 8.3%. The Florida enrollment decline is driven exclusively by financially needy students from lower income backgrounds choosing to forgo college because they cannot afford college.
Pell Grants are federal financial aid awarded to financially needy students from the bottom half of the income distribution. These grants range up to $7,395 in the coming school year and are used to help pay a student’s costs of college attendance including tuition and fees, books and supplies, room and board, transportation, personal and medical expenses. While the maximum Pell Grant is large, it falls far short of average costs of attendance. For the 2022-23 academic year, the annual cost of attendance at the University of Florida was $21,810. So a student from a low income family background still must find another $14,915 to finance his/her college budget. With the aid of a college financial aid officer, the student may be awarded additional grants or scholarships, earnings from a work-study job, or take out education loans to be repaid with interest after the student leaves college. But there still remains an unmet financial need gap that blocks college enrollment for a growing share of students from low income backgrounds..
I have been studying the financial barriers to higher education for undergraduate college students for more than 50 years. These financial barriers include unmet financial need, student work-loan burden, and net price to family. I use data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study to measure these financial barriers. Currently data are available for the years between 1990 and 2016. The following financial barrier of unmet financial need was calculated from national data for a dependent student, enrolled full-time, for a nine-month academic year, at a single institution.
Unmet financial need is the difference between the student’s financial need calculated by federal formula and all financial aid received by the student.
- For a dependent student from the bottom quartile of family income (below $32,800 in 2016 dollars) the average unmet financial need increased from $3,665 in 1990 to $9,143 in 2016 in constant dollars.
- For a student from the second quartile of family income ($32,800 to $71,600), average unmet financial need increased from $385 in 1990 to $7,665 by 2016.
- For a student from the third quartile of family income ($71,600 to $124,700) there was no unmet financial need.
- For a student from the top quartile of family income (above $124,700) the sum of the family contribution and financial aid exceeded costs of attendance by $18,136 in 1990 and by $26,995 in 2016.
As the data make clear unmet financial need barriers occur only among students from the bottom half of the family income distribution — those that have been turning away from higher education since 2010.
The financial barriers for Florida students have been magnified by the state’s relatively weak commitment to investment in higher education. For 2022 Florida’s state fiscal support for higher education was $4.32 per $1,000 of state personal income, and Florida ranked 33rd among the states by this measure of effort. Florida’s higher education investment effort peaked in 1975 at $8.61 per $1,000, and ranked 37th among the states at that time. The 2022 higher education investment effort is almost exactly half of the investment effort made in 1975. If Florida continues to defund public higher education, state investment in higher education will reach zero in another 47 years.
Florida offers some need-based financial aid to students, but these efforts are very weak compared to the size of federal efforts to provide Pell Grants to needy undergraduate Floridians. Florida’s grants reach 37% of the students aided by Pell Grants, and Florida dollars match about 15% of federal Pell Grant dollars.
Florida is a state characterized by:
- High income inequality. Florida has the seventh highest income inequality among the nation’s 50 states.
- High poverty rates. Florida ranks 14th among the states in the share of its population living below the poverty line.
- Low family income. Florida ranks 41st among the states on median family income.
- High school lunch program eligibility. Florida has the sixth highest rate of K-12 students approved for the national school lunch program based on low family income.
- Low college participation. Florida ranks 32nd among the states in the rate at which its 19-year-olds reach college.
Education at every level is an investment in the future. Florida’s weak investment in higher education bodes ill for its future in an economy increasingly based on human capital. Perhaps affluent Floridians are comfortable living among inequality and its associated consequences. But there is an alternative to this world that extends opportunity for achievement and success based on effort and education to poorly served Florida students. Re-engaging students from lower income families in higher education must be at the top of this to-do list. Targeted state investment on financially needy students is necessary to remove the financial barriers that block their access to higher education, and ultimately deny to the state of Florida their full productive contribution.
Tom Mortenson, senior scholar, The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, has been ahigher education policy analyst for more than 50 years. He is a resident of Lehigh Acres.