A Call for Restoring Year-Round Pell

The 2011 decision to end a short-lived program that let students earn two Pell Grants in a single academic year was blamed on a range of factors, including that the program's costs raged out of control and that it failed to encourage students to finish their degrees more quickly. A paper published this morning by the New America Foundation (and discussed in this Inside Higher Ed essay) argues that many of the reasons put forward to explain the program's demise don't stand up to scrutiny -- and that the program, if restored in modified form, could greatly benefit community college students in particular.