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Economic Diversity Among the Top 25 Ranked Schools

National Universities

Economic diversity has received growing attention in higher education, particularly at elite top-ranked schools that haven't traditionally enrolled large numbers of low-income students or students from low-income families. This table shows the percentage of undergraduates receiving federal Pell Grants for low-income students at top-ranked schools in 2015 Best Colleges rankings.

The proportion of students receiving Pell Grants, which are most often given to undergrads with family incomes under $20,000, isn't a perfect measure of an institution's efforts to achieve economic diversity: A college might enroll a large number of students just above the Pell cutoff, for instance, and percentages at public universities may reflect the wide variation from state to state in the number of qualified low-income students.

Still, many experts say that Pell figures are the best available gauge of how many low-income undergrads there are on a given campus. Pell Grant percentages were calculated using 2012-2013 school year data on the number of Pell Grant recipients at each school collected by the U.S. Department of Education and given to U.S. News and fall 2012 total undergraduate enrollment collected from the colleges themselves by U.S. News.

National Universities Liberal Arts Colleges Regional Universities Regional Colleges

U.S. News rank	School	Percent of undergraduates receiving Pell Grants:
^#23 Overall Score: 76 out of 100.	University of California—Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA	39%
^#20 Overall Score: 79 out of 100.	University of California—Berkeley Berkeley, CA	36%
^#4 Overall Score: 95 out of 100.	Columbia University New York, NY	30%
^#25 Overall Score: 75 out of 100.	University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA	24%
^#21 Overall Score: 77 out of 100.	Emory University Atlanta, GA	22%
^#2 Overall Score: 99 out of 100.	Harvard University Cambridge, MA	19%
^#7 Overall Score: 93 out of 100.	Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA	18%
^#19 Overall Score: 82 out of 100.	Rice University Houston, TX	18%
^#15 Overall Score: 85 out of 100.	Cornell University Ithaca, NY	17%
^#8 Overall Score: 92 out of 100.	University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA	17%
^#13 Overall Score: 88 out of 100.	Northwestern University Evanston, IL	16%
^#4 Overall Score: 95 out of 100.	Stanford University Stanford, CA	16%
^#16 Overall Score: 84 out of 100.	Brown University Providence, RI	15%
^#11 Overall Score: 90 out of 100.	Dartmouth College Hanover, NH	14%
^#8 Overall Score: 92 out of 100.	Duke University Durham, NC	14%
^#4 Overall Score: 95 out of 100.	University of Chicago Chicago, IL	14%
^#16 Overall Score: 84 out of 100.	Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN	14%
^#25 Overall Score: 75 out of 100.	Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA	13%
^#21 Overall Score: 77 out of 100.	Georgetown University Washington, DC	13%
^#12 Overall Score: 89 out of 100.	Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD	13%
^#23 Overall Score: 76 out of 100.	University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA	13%
^#3 Overall Score: 98 out of 100.	Yale University New Haven, CT	13%
^#1 Overall Score: 100 out of 100.	Princeton University Princeton, NJ	12%
^#16 Overall Score: 84 out of 100.	University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN	12%
^#10 Overall Score: 91 out of 100.	California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CA	11%