A Poison Pell for Public Colleges? Pell Grants and Funding for Public Colleges in the U. S

This study links federal Pell grants to college students in the United States to the decades-long decline in state-local funding for public colleges. The effect is at least as significant as other explanations based on taxes, Medicaid, or K-12 funding. Estimates are obtained from multiple identification strategies, including a crossover, repeated-measures (RM) design—a powerful design particularly well suited to the Pell program. The results offer a compelling example of how federal funding can induce an unintended cascade of effects even when it is given to individuals, not as traditional inter-governmental grants.