Penn has been deemed unaffordable to qualified students from low- and medium-income families, according to a report released Monday about the affordability of higher education at schools across the country.
The report was compiled by the Lumina Foundation for Higher Education, a private organization dedicated to expanding higher education, which surveyed 2,800 colleges and universities across the country to gauge how affordable and selective they are to students of families with low incomes.
Lumina's report found that more than one-fourth of all the public institutions in 16 states, including Pennsylvania, were inaccessible to low-income students, while more than ninety percent of the public colleges and universities in 14 other states were accessible.
According to Derek Price, Lumina's director of higher education research, states varied widely in terms of number of affordable universities.
"There are two significant findings," Price said. "The first is that geography matters."
Lumina also found that almost all private institutions, including all eight Ivy League schools, are either too selective or too expensive to be viable options for these students.
In fact, only 100 of the 1,500 private colleges surveyed were rated accessible.
However, despite the organization's empirical evidence, some have criticized the report for being conducted in an unscientific manner.
The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, an organization that represents private institutions, has been one of the report's most vocal detractors.
"We have problems with it on two major fronts," said Roland King, vice president of affairs for the NAICU. "One is the methodology."
In a statement released Monday, NAICU president David Warren expressed his concern about the report's validity.
The report "relies on an array of assumptions, mathematical manipulations and imagination to conclude that only a few of the nation's private colleges and universities are [affordable]," Warren said in his statement.
King also voiced concerns about the numbers.
"The data is very soft," King said. "There are even averages of averages used."
Price said that in conducting its research, Lumina took some of these arguments into account.
"We are aware of these criticisms," Price said. "We also do recognize that private colleges may provide one to two thousand dollars more to those [low-income] students."
The extra two thousand dollars is not enough to finance an education for students with low income, though, according to Price.
"We found that those colleges would have to provide two to three times the average aid to these students," he said.
King said that colleges and universities have been trying to increase the amount of financial aid to low-income students in an attempt to entice first generation students to continue their education.
"First-generation students are scared away from even considering college," King said. "Something like this undermines this whole effort."
Price said that the report focussed primarily on low-income, average-performing students because cost more than any other factors determines whether or not they can go on to college.
"We excluded the high income and high achieving students because these are not determining whether to go to college but where to go to college,"
Price said.
