Laura Perna on Access to Higher Education

Laura W. Perna is the Graduate School of Education’s Centennial Presidential Professor of Education, the current Vice Provost for Faculty, and Founding Executive Director of the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy (AHEAD) at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the past chair of Penn’s faculty senate and has served as a faculty fellow of the Penn Institute for Urban Research, a faculty affiliate of the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative, and a member of the faculty advisory board for the Netter Center for Community Partnerships. She holds bachelor’s degrees in economics and psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and earned her master’s in public policy and Ph.D. in education from the University of Michigan.

Access to high quality postsecondary education is a critical issue for the nation. How do public and institutional policies enable access—and success—for post-K-12 education, especially for disadvantaged students? Laura Perna’s scholarship examines the policy choices before us, assessing college access, affordability, and success, especially for low-income, first-generation, and non-traditional students. Her current projects focus on improving equity in higher education in the United States and advancing knowledge of College Promise – aka free tuition – programs.

Among the nation's leading scholars on issues of college access and affordability, Perna has advanced the discourse on equity in higher education through numerous highly acclaimed edited volumes, reports, and articles. Her impactful research agenda includes the highly cited “Indicators of Higher Education Equity in the United States,” an annual report published from 2015 to 2022 and again in 2024 by the Pell Institute in conjunction with AHEAD and widely considered one of the most comprehensive reports on educational outcomes in the United States. Since 2019, Perna has also served as the editor of Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, an annual publication by Springer, acclaimed for its curation of insightful contributions on pressing topics.

The broader themes of Perna’s scholarship identify systemic barriers to higher education and inform solutions to expand equitable access for all, regardless of demographic or geographic background or place of residence. Her research is central to bridging theory and practice for the successful implementation of equity-focused policy, which in recent years has included growing discussion on “Promise programs” – programs that guarantee that, if students meet specified eligibility criteria, then at least some of the costs of attendance (typically tuition) will be covered.

On the topic of Promise programs, Perna’s 2021 article in Education Policy Analysis Archives, co-authored with Penn Graduate School of Education alumni Jeremy Wright-Kim, Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Michigan, and Elaine W. Leigh, Associate Policy Research at the RAND Corporation, “Will college promise programs improve or reduce equity? Understanding the contextual conditions that influence implementation” is particularly relevant. Perna and her co-authors highlight that while “free tuition” programs are being created by states, communities, and institutions across the nation, their implementation drives outcomes. The authors find that organizational conditions are key to the efficacy of these programs and provide clear implementation strategies to increase equity. Importantly, Perna and her co-authors offer a conceptual model for the design and implementation of equity-driven promise programs.

In a common thread across her scholarship, Perna makes the case that fulfilling the "American dream" of a college education requires taking on and taking down structural barriers that have historically disadvantaged vulnerable populations with respect to financial capacity, academic readiness, and support systems—three key factors required to access and succeed in higher education. The research points to college preparation programs as one opportunity to level the field. By harnessing the collective assets of school communities and their unique strengths, these programs can improve results for students disadvantaged by structural inequities. Promoting the idea of college within peer groups and across social networks also influences positive outcomes. But as Perna illuminates, the nuances of programmatic and organizational context matter. Her research provides a blueprint for a diverse range of stakeholders, including policymakers, practitioners, and researchers, to navigate the challenges to fulfilling the promise of Promise programs in a meaningful and sustainable way.

Excerpts

“Policy implementation is influenced by some combination of actions by top-level administrators and “street-level” service deliverers (Matland, 1995, p. 148). Top-level administrators affect implementation at the macro-level by defining program goals, monitoring outcomes, and setting rules for program delivery. Service deliverers influence implementation at the micro-level by making frontline decisions about delivery in the local context (Willging et al., 2017). 

Matland (1995) argues that the relative contributions of top-level administrators and street-level bureaucrats depend on policy conflict and ambiguity. College promise programs, especially at community colleges, may be characterized as low conflict, as program goals align with the mission of community colleges to provide opportunity for higher education in the local community. We define promise programs as having a goal of increasing higher education attainment, a financial award above and beyond existing federal and state grant aid, and place-based student eligibility requirements in lieu of or in addition to financial need or academic achievement (Perna & Smith, 2020b)…

Eligibility requirements determine the number and characteristics of participants. One eligibility requirement that limits participation to more advantaged students is full-time enrollment. Stakeholders argue that requiring full-time enrollment boosts completion rates. Suggesting an external force that may contribute to the presence of this requirement, a Northeast administrator  states that this requirement adds to ‘your overall retention rates, your completion rates.’ Yet, full-time enrollment may limit participation of students from underserved groups…

Program content, especially the characteristics of the financial award, also has consequences for equity. The studied institutions provide a last-dollar award for up to the costs of tuition. Because most first-time full-time students receive a Pell Grant at Rural (62%), Northeast (69%), and Midwest (59%, Table 1), programs at these institutions provide no new money to most students. Last-dollar awards also do not recognize that college attendance has other costs, including books, supplies, living expenses, and transportation. For instance, in 2018-19 tuition and fees represented 37% of total cost of attendance at West College for students living with their parents and 24% of total cost for students living on their own…

Sources of funding may also influence program coverage. Midwest, Northeast, and West use funds raised from private donors to pay the institution’s costs of the financial award. A Midwest administrator explained that two eligibility requirements, a minimum GPA and community service, were adopted to meet perceived donor preferences for “skin in the game”…

College promise programs are a potential mechanism for advancing the historical mission of community colleges and advancing equity in higher education. Although we know that program characteristics vary (Perna & Smith, 2020a) and that the effects of a program on college enrollment vary based on program characteristics (Gándara & Li, 2020), only a few scholars (e.g., Smith, 2020) have explored the forces that contribute to variation in program characteristics. As predicted for programs with low policy conflict and high ambiguity (Matland, 1995), and consistent with other program implementation research (Dowd et al., 2013; Honig, 2006; Nienhusser, 2014, 2018), our findings point to the importance of contextual conditions for understanding the characteristics of programs implemented at community colleges and the consequences of implemented programs for equity…

As expected with policy ambiguity (Matland, 1995; Nienhusser, 2014), the content and coverage of the promise programs examined in this study appear related to contextual conditions. As such, program implications for equity should be considered in light of the context. For example, the absence of criteria that limit eligibility to low-income students may allocate resources to relatively advantaged students. Yet, at institutions in service-areas with high poverty and low educational attainment, a program that encourages more people to attend and complete college may produce important economic and non-economic benefits for the local community (McMahon, 2009). If programs increase total enrollment, programs may also provide community colleges with revenue needed to continue to serve their disproportionately low-income, Black, and Hispanic populations (Hillman, 2020). 

Expansion of free tuition programs at the state and/or federal levels may create opportunities to adapt content and coverage of these and other community college promise programs in ways that improve equity. Recognizing the need for a politically and financially sustainable approach, new resources could be used to preserve the principle of a universal program (i.e., defining the program goal as everyone has the opportunity to attend college), while also better ensuring that program content and coverage enable students from underserved groups to achieve the program goal (i.e., targeted universalism, Powell et al., 2019)…

To implement promise programs that improve equity, stakeholders should recognize how programmatic and organizational contextual conditions influence program coverage and content. These conditions may work for or against efforts to promote equity. We hope that policymakers, practitioners, and researchers can use the conceptual model that emerged from this study to further consider how to implement sustainable promise programs that improve equity within particular contexts.”