Prison Education Programs Await Pell Grant Approval Amid Slow Rollout

In January, the prison education program (PEP) at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt (Cal Poly Humboldt) became the first in the country to be approved for federal Pell Grant funding.

The approval enables students enrolled in the university’s bachelor of arts in communication program at Pelican Bay State Prison to use Pell Grant funding beginning this fall.

Pell Grants are income-based awards for undergraduates with exceptional financial need. They do not need to be repaid. Previously, incarcerated students weren’t eligible for Pell Grants, outside of limited pilot programs, requiring them to pay for their education out of pocket.

Last summer, the Department of Education (ED) extended Pell Grant eligibility to incarcerated students, a direct result of the FAFSA Simplification Act, which took effect in July 2023.

Steven Ladwig, director of Cal Poly Humboldt’s Transformative and Restorative Education Center, credited the institution’s fast approval mostly to timing.

Ladwig told BestColleges that the program was already working on ensuring its accreditation was current and was also applying for a Department of Justice grant with similar criteria to the one for PEP approval.

However, months later, Cal Poly Humboldt remains the sole prison education program in the nation approved for Pell Grant funding.

Established in 2020, the University of California, Irvine’s (UCI) Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees (LIFTED) program was among the first in the state to offer bachelor’s degrees to incarcerated students.

The program is a partnership between UCI and Southwestern College at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, offering bachelor’s degrees in sociology to students who already have their associate degrees.

The program admitted its first cohort of 23 students in 2022, with around 50 students being admitted in the second and third cohorts combined.

UCI LIFTED applied for Pell Grant funding in August 2023, around the same time as Cal Poly Humboldt, Keramet Reiter, faculty director of UCI LIFTED, told BestColleges. However, the program is still waiting on approval.

“We’re a little frustrated that we are still awaiting approval,” she said. “But, we are in touch with the Department of Education [and] we’re very hopeful that we’re going to get approval before the end of this year so that we can fund students this past year and going forward next year.”

Reiter, who also serves as a professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, described the approval process as “fairly straightforward” since their prison education program was up and running for a year before they applied for Pell Grant funding.

“There are some requirements around documenting the degrees your students are getting and how the program is working, and also making sure that the program is accredited. And we had already done all of that,” she said. “I don’t really understand what the holdup has been.”

Reiter also noted that since a significant amount of time has passed since their initial application, they needed to update specific aspects of the application that were not necessary for Cal Poly Humboldt to complete.

The program only started communicating with ED concerning the program’s approval in March.

As of May 31, UCI LIFTED has not yet been approved. Reiter said in an email statement that the organization is working through the final steps with ED and providing the personal contact information of senior campus administrators on the application.

“We are hoping to secure all the required personal information and have our application reviewed any day,” she said.

A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson told BestColleges that the department continuously receives and thoroughly evaluates applications. Since the application window opened on July 3, 2023, the department has not denied any applications.

The PEPs must meet several requirements to be approved by ED for Pell Grant eligibility including:

Universities are also required to check annually to ensure that there are no restrictions on licensure or employment for incarcerated individuals in the fields or careers the PEP is preparing them for.

First, institutions need approval from any partner correctional facilities and oversight entities to offer a PEP at the chosen facility. They then need to work with an accrediting agency to get program approval before submitting an application to ED.

Reiter explained that just because a university is accredited doesn’t mean its prison education program, which operates in a separate physical facility from campus, is accredited.

“It means generally that an accreditor has to come physically visit the prison site and see the classroom space, make sure there’s adequate space, talk with the students, [and] talk with the faculty,” she said. “We went through that process in the fall [of 2022] so we were already set by the time we put in our PEP application. We had been approved.”

Institutions navigating the PEP application and approval process can continue to offer their programs to incarcerated students for up to three years, until June 30, 2026, according to the ED.

For the last three decades, incarcerated students have had limited access to higher education due to the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which removed eligibility for incarcerated students to receive Pell Grants.

With the expansion of Pell funding to incarcerated students, ED projects that approximately 760,000 additional individuals will now qualify for federal financial aid.

The benefits of PEP programs are well documented. Those who enroll in college courses while incarcerated are roughly half as likely to recidivate compared to those who do not take any type of educational course, according to research conducted by the RAND Corporation.

With more students becoming eligible for financial aid, interest in degree programs is expected to be high.

Ladwig says that incarcerated students in California prisons have expressed interest in transferring to Pelican Bay State Prison just to join Cal Poly Humboldt’s bachelor’s program.

“Transferring prisons is an incredibly stressful process in the best of circumstances, and here we are, having students who are choosing to transfer to what is societally the most remote prison in the state,” he explained.

“We’re the hardest of any major airport, any major highway [to get to], and students are still choosing to come here for their education. So yes, the interest has grown.”

Reiter estimates that in California alone, there are over 10,000 incarcerated students with associate degrees who would like to get a bachelor’s degree. However, the current infrastructure can’t accommodate such a large number of students.

“The dream is that [Pell] expands educational opportunities, that this makes it financially feasible for universities to move into this space,” Reiter said.

Before Pell Grant funding was a possibility, incarcerated students enrolled in the UC system could rely on UC’s Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan, which covers UC tuition and fees for California students with a household income of less than $80,000 a year.

Reiter said the Blue and Gold program was designed to be a “bit more robust” than Pell Grant funding, including students who weren’t traditionally covered by Pell Grants such as undocumented learners and incarcerated students.

The program can also be used as a “top-off” program, giving students the extra funds necessary if Pell funding doesn’t cover the whole cost of tuition or if their families make just enough money to not qualify for Pell Grants.

The approval for Pell Grant funding will enable the UCI LIFTED program to redirect funds that would have supported incarcerated students back to the Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan for broader student use. The funding will also allow UCI to offer summer courses to students since students will be able to cover the extra cost.

“The way the aid is structured, they have to take a full course load every quarter, for six quarters. With summer [school], we’re hopeful that … if someone has to drop a class one quarter, they can pick it up in the summer. So it’ll hopefully take a little bit of pressure off students,” Reiter said.