It was in the quiet of the summer when Jeff Kahlden heard that a promising young student he advised in a rural high school west of Fort Worth, Texas, was in trouble.
The boy was left with no place to live after his grandmother, who was raising him, had a stroke.
Kahlden was then counseling low-income high school students considering going to college. The work was part of Upward Bound, part of a collection of federally funded higher education support programs for lower-income Americans called TRIO.
He and other Upward Bound staff took the boy into their own homes and gave him the help he needed to get through his senior year of high school, then on to community college and ultimately to a satellite campus of the University of Texas, where he earned a bachelor’s degree.
They made sure he took the courses he needed to keep moving forward and filled out the application and registration paperwork that is daunting even for young people who have parents to pitch in. Other TRIO programs provided more support for him along the way.
Without TRIO, said Kahlden, who oversees the same group of programs today as director of grant management services at Dallas College, a lot of low-income students “would not leave home or take the route they might have as a college student or realize the opportunities that are out there.”
Now TRIO has come under the scrutiny of the Trump administration, which has already canceled TRIO funding for a few participating colleges and proposes to eliminate it altogether; letters from the Department of Education to those colleges suggest the money was cut off because the programs were considered part of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, efforts.
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At a time of rising income inequality, it’s one of several developments advocates worry are converging to make things even harder for lower-income Americans who want to go to and get through college — a group that already faces considerable challenges, and whose proportion of enrollment has been falling for a decade and a half.
Cash-strapped universities and colleges are shifting financial aid to middle- and upper-income families who can afford to pay at least a part of the tuition. States forced to absorb some of the billions cut by Congress from Medicaid and SNAP are expected to have less money to spare for higher education. And the federal government is both cutting and proposing to entirely scrap support programs that help low-income students.
“The downstream effect is less [financial] aid and fewer lower-income students,” said Julie Wollman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
“We should be worried about two things” in what’s been happening to higher education, said Wollman, a former university president. “One is that there’s just not going to be as much aid to go around, because as federal funding is cut, more endowment money and more of the operating budget will have to make up for that. The other is the cuts to all sorts of support programs.”
The Trump administration has called for eliminating the nearly $1.6 billion a year the government spends on TRIO and on GEAR UP, for instance, which stands for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs and helps schools and colleges encourage mostly low-income students to consider and prepare for college.
Young people who participate in TRIO are more likely to go to and graduate from college than similar students who don’t, according to the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the Council for Opportunity in Education. Some members of Congress from both parties have said they oppose ending it.
But the administration’s budget proposal calls TRIO “a relic of the past.” Today, it says, “access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means.”
In fact, the proportion of low-income students in college continues to decline. About 32 percent of undergraduates received federal Pell Grants — a measure of low-income status — in 2022-23, the most recent academic year for which the figure is available from the Department of Education. That’s down from a peak of 41 percent in 2011.
Other federal funding that supported low-income students has also gotten caught up in the Trump administration’s pushback against DEI. The Justice Department has declared several such initiatives unconstitutional because, among other reasons, they went to institutions enrolling minimum numbers of students of a particular race, such as grants to help low-income Black students at predominantly Black institutions.
The administration also proposes to jettison a program called Child Care Access Means Parents in School, or CCAMPIS, that helps low-income students with children pay for daycare. The administration has already canceled some grants provided through CCAMPIS, saying that the daycare centers where student-parents’ children were enrolled practiced affirmative action in hiring and taught gender identity and racial justice, The Washington Post has reported.
Nearly 20 percent of undergraduate students have children, according to the Urban Institute, and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research says they are significantly less likely to graduate than their classmates who don’t have children; the figure is from 2019, the last time the women’s research institute studied the question. Parents who get daycare through CCAMPIS, however, are less likely to drop out than full-time students in general, according to the most recent analysis by the Congressional Research Service.
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The administration’s proposed budget would also cut the nearly $1 billion federal work-study program that subsidizes on-campus jobs for about 600,000 students, which it calls “a handout to woke universities” that “can pay for their own employees.”
These potential new obstacles coincide with an increase in the proportion of K-12 students who are low-income and “excluded from a realistic chance to earn a college degree” without some help, according to the Pell Institute.
They need more help than ever, The Century Foundation reports. The average price for college, after discounts and financial aid, comes to about 15 percent of the income of families in the top quarter of income, but nearly 90 percent of the earnings of families in the lowest quarter, it says — a gap that has doubled over the last 20 years.
Making things worse, tuition at many institutions is beginning to go up again after being generally flat or down from 2018 to 2023, when adjusted for inflation. Only a little more than a third of even public four-year universities, and fewer than half of community colleges, are affordable, meaning that the average family could cover their costs with the help of the financial aid available to them, a September study by the National College Attainment Network, or NCAN, found.
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This will likely grow more dire, NCAN warns, as other federal cuts to higher education and to Medicaid and SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, strain state budgets.
Public universities and colleges have historically been among the first to see their state allocations fall as such financial pressures trickle downward, said Louisa Woodhouse, NCAN’s senior policy and advocacy associate. But “slashing education funding to plug other budgetary holes will only widen affordability gaps for students and push postsecondary education further out of reach.”
Already, nearly twice the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds from families in the top quarter of income as from families in the lowest quarter go to college, the Pell Institute reports, and students from the most affluent families are nearly four times more likely than students from the least affluent to get a bachelor’s degree.
Wealth also determines where young Americans enroll. The most selective colleges and universities have the lowest proportions of low-income students and the least competitive have the highest, the Pell Institute research finds.
There are some positive signs for lower-income students. Significantly more students than last year had completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, the form required to receive financial aid, the Education Department announced in December. And nearly two-thirds of families considered the new, simplified version of the FAFSA easier to fill out than in the past, according to a survey conducted for the student lender Sallie Mae (though nearly 60 percent said they still needed help).
The number of low-income students applying to college through the Common Application — a single form accepted by more than 1,000 admissions offices — was up by 9 percent in the fall, compared to 2 percent for applicants generally.
Whether those low-income prospects will actually enroll depends largely on the financial aid they’re offered, at a time when other new research suggests that colleges in pursuit of badly needed revenue are not only raising their prices, but directing much of their financial aid to higher-income families who can afford to pay at least some of the tuition.
“There’s only so much aid to go around,” said Wollman, at the University of Pennsylvania.
The research, by The Century Foundation, finds that 56 percent of families in the top quarter of income got more financial aid than they needed as colleges tried to lure them in with scholarships and discounts. This “leaves working families paying the bill for tuition increases,” the report’s author, Peter Granville, said.
“Is that money reaching the students who need it the most? No, it’s not,” said Granville. “Oftentimes it’s going to students who are higher income and for whom it’s just a cherry on top.” Many lower-income students, meanwhile, “are not getting enough financial aid to affordably enroll in college.”
One reason universities and colleges are encountering their own intensifying money problems is that their enrollment is declining.
With expenses also increasing, resulting in a negative outlook for the industry from ratings agencies including S&P Global, colleges’ need for revenue is affecting who some of them admit.
To lock in as many students as they can, some of the nation’s most selective colleges and universities are expanding the proportions of their classes they accept through a practice called early decision. This gives students higher odds of being admitted, but requires them to enroll if accepted without firm knowledge of how much money they will have to pay.
Applicants from lower-income families are much less likely than applicants from wealthier families to apply for early decision — even when they have higher standardized test scores or grade-point averages — according to the Common App.
That’s because lower-income students who go to poorly resourced public high schools may not even be aware they have this option. And if they are, they’re reluctant to apply for it, since they can’t commit to any institution without knowing how much they’ll get in financial aid.
The number of colleges enrolling at least four out of 10 applicants through early decision is up by 50 percent since 2015, according to new research from Class Action, which pushes elite universities and colleges to help more Americans climb the socioeconomic ladder.
Davidson College took 69 percent of its students this way in 2024, Class Action reports; Middlebury College and Emory University, 68 percent; Claremont McKenna College and Bucknell University, 67 percent.
While selective institutions such as these enroll only a small fraction of the nation’s students, their graduates typically earn more than the alumni of less-selective schools, Wollman pointed out. So for applicants shut out of classes mostly filled through early decision, she said, “it reduces their opportunity not only for college, but for everything that happens after.”
Political and financial pressures on colleges and universities are only getting worse, said James Murphy, a senior fellow at Class Action who authored the report. “It’s a moment of deep uncertainty right now, especially if you’re a university that relied on a lot of federal money for research,” much of which the Trump administration is trying to withdraw, said Murphy.
That might encourage even more use of strategies such as early decision, he said.
“I would not be at all surprised to see those percentages tick up even higher, and that’s likely to harm low- and middle-income students,” Murphy said of the proportion of entering classes admitted through early decision.
Even some flagship public universities have now adopted early decision. The University of Michigan added it in the fall; the University of Virginia, which previously dropped early decision as a “barrier to qualified low-income students,” reinstated it beginning with the class that entered in the fall of 2020.
Another change that will disproportionately affect lower-income students: new limits on federal loans for graduate and professional school, according to a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
Under the restrictions, which take effect in July, graduate students will be able to borrow a maximum of $20,500 a year and a total of $100,000; students in professional schools, up to $50,000 a year and $200,000 in all.
More than half of graduates of medical and law schools borrow more than that, according to the Philadelphia Fed, while more than a quarter of students in master’s degree programs have loans that exceed the new caps. Yet 38 percent of graduate and professional students have no credit score or a credit score below the typical cutoff to qualify for private loans that might make up the difference.
“Some observers worry that many borrowers, especially those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, those with a poor or thin prior credit history and those with no available cosigner,” the report concluded, “may not be able to get a private loan and will therefore be unable to pursue graduate study.”
Jeff Kahlden at Dallas College is still in touch with many of the students he’s advised through programs funded by TRIO. One graduated from Stanford; another from George Washington University before also earning a master’s degree.
“Those kids are driven,” he said. “But had we not had them in our program, they wouldn’t have gone to those places.”
As for the student whose grandmother had a stroke, he now works as a math teacher and coach at a rural high school.
“He teaches his students about having grit,” Kahlden noted admiringly — “about having the ability to fight through some things.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about low-income college students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.
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