McNeil Building, Room 410
Higher Education in Prison: The Precarious Promise of Second Chance Pell
In the last several years, providing access to post-secondary education in prisons has received widespread bipartisan support at both state and federal levels. In 2015, after a funding drought of more than two decades, the Second Chance Pell pilot program, which allows colleges and universities to use federal Pell dollars to fund higher education in prison programs, reinvigorated the landscape of higher education in prison. Last year, Congress reinstated access to Pell funded higher education for incarcerated individuals and overhauled the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in an attempt to increase access to federal student aid. The fanfare regarding these policy changes suggests that they are poised to create a sea change in prison higher education nationwide. However, recent research has shown that eligibility requirements may severely limit the reach of Pell-funded higher education opportunities. Furthermore, the equity consequences of adjusting eligibility requirements to expand the scale of Second Chance Pell are unknown. In this talk, I will discuss the implications of recent policy changes on the scalability of Pell funded higher education and then explore the equity consequences of potential policy interventions to expand Pell eligibility for incarcerated individuals. I will conclude by discussing the implications of these implementation challenges for our understanding of the relationship between Pell funded higher educational programming and individual outcomes both during incarceration and after release.