As we tumble down the back side of the fall term, I know that the potential value of a long and involved blog post drops like a stone in the face of the ten things that have to be solved right now(!).  So I’m gonna just roll out one big-picture data point and let you mull it over when you get a chance to breathe.

Remember that economic collapse that wrecked the economy and scared the pants off of tuition dependent college like us?  Yeah, sorry – not the best way to start the week.  Although there are a few reasons to think that the American economy might be slowly pulling out of its nose dive, we all know that the ripple effects haven’t abated much.

I’ve been trolling our three years of senior survey data lately to look for trends that might be worth noting (see last week’s post on a couple of general education items).  This morning one set of numbers really jumped out at me; the increasing proportion of our students who qualify for Pell Grants – a group of students who almost certainly wouldn’t be at Augustana if it weren’t for need-based financial aid from the federal government and the state of Illinois through the MAP grant program.

The table below shows the increase in this aspect of our student population over the past three classes.  I’ve included the actual numbers in parentheses to add some perspective.

Cohort	% Pell Recipients as entering freshmen	% Pell Recipients as graduating seniors
Fall of 2008 – Spring of 2012	12.5% (80/641)	10.7% (51/476)
Fall of 2009 – Spring of 2013	17.5% (108/616)	14.2% (66/465)
Fall of 2010 – Spring of 2014	24.6% (185/753)	22.4% (119/532)

You can see that over a relatively short period of time, we’ve roughly doubled the proportion of students who receive Pell Grants (and therefore also received MAP Grants from the state of Illinois).  If you look closely, you can see a hint of this lower socioeconomic status on retention and graduation, since the proportion of these students shrinks over the course of four years.

Just in case you were wondering, 26.2% of our student body (655/2500) of our current overall student body is receiving a Pell Grant.  And among our newest class of freshmen, 28.1% are receiving Pell Grants.

The headline of this blog referred to the stereotype that we like to throw around about our students coming from the Chicago suburbs.  Sometimes I hear that stereotype dressed up with healthy dose of wealth, homogeneity, and entitlement.  I’m not trying to suggest that those students don’t exist at Augustana.  Of course they do.  But the thing about these numbers that hit me was this:

• We have a trend in our data that suggests a growing proportion (now over a quarter of our student body) of our students that, at least on one critical dimension, don’t conform to that stereotype.
• Are we adapting our expectations and interactions with our students to match what we know about from whence they come?

Make it a good day,

Mark