Federal student aid and college pricing: Do Pell Grants supplement or supplant institutional grant aid?

Free and open to the public.

From the speaker's abstract: The federal Pell Grant Program provides billions of dollars in subsidies to low-income college students to increase affordability and access to higher education. In her recent research, Lesley Turner tests whether colleges respond to the Pell Grant program by altering institutional aid provided to Pell Grant recipients. Turner's findings show that, overall, 16 percent of all Pell Grant aid is passed-through to schools in the form of higher effective prices. Turner will discuss how crowd-out of Pell Grant aid varies across institutional control and selectivity and potential policies that could reduce crowd-out of need-based federal student aid

About the speaker: Lesley Turner (MPP '05), Assistant Professor of Economics, joined the University of Maryland after receiving her PhD from Columbia University in 2012. Her research applies theory and methods from labor and public economics to topics in the economics of education and broadly considers the role government should play in providing and financing education. She has written papers examining how postsecondary institutions strategically respond to need-based student aid, the design of teacher incentive pay, and the impact of school accountability measures on student achievement. Lesley holds BA and MPP degrees from the University of Michigan.

• higher education