Most of the money from the 2022 round of emergency financial-aid grants through the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, or HEERF, went to students of color and recipients of Pell Grants, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Education.
Nationwide, institutions distributed $7.9 billion in emergency financial aid to students, either as direct grants or credits to their outstanding account balances, during the 2022 reporting cycle. An analysis by The Chronicle looked at a subset of 2,800 degree-granting institutions. Of that group, about 2,400 institutions reported distributing emergency grants during the 2022 year, giving out a total of nearly $7 billion to more than six million students.
Colleges disbursed about half as much money in 2022 as they did during the 2021 calendar year, when they distributed more than $19 billion in student grants. The Chronicle previously analyzed some of the ways that colleges distributed relief money last year.
Our new analysis found that, in 2022, 56 percent of the emergency grants went to students who receive Pell Grants, and about 62 percent went to students of color. Conversely, 54 percent of students who receive Pell Grants got HEERF emergency grants, as did 37 percent of students of color. Over all, Pell recipients make up about a quarter of students enrolled at the institutions The Chronicle found; students of color account for half of all students whose race was known at those institutions. The average grant was about $1,105, with Pell recipients receiving $1,372 on average and students of color receiving about $1,178.
The share of emergency grants going to those two groups of students often mirrored the demographics of institutions’ enrollment. For example, among the institutions that gave the highest share (more than 88 percent) of their emergency grants to students of color — 10 percent of the colleges in the analysis — such students represented about 87 percent of enrollment.
Among the institutions that gave the lowest share of emergency aid money (less than 17 percent) to students of color — also 10 percent of colleges in the analysis — students of color represented about 17 percent of enrollment. A similar trend, though to a lesser extent, held true for Pell-eligible students.
Explore the table below to see where your institution falls.
Methodology
Data are for both “Institutional” and “Student Aid” HEERF funds allocated to colleges for 2022 that were disbursed to students as emergency financial-aid grants or applied to students’ outstanding account balances. Data are self-reported, and some values may contain errors. Only degree-granting institutions in the United States that are eligible to receive Title IV federal financial aid are included. “Students of color” refers to students of races and ethnicities other than white, and does not count students whose race or ethnicity was unknown or uncategorized or those who were nonresident aliens. Those students were also not counted when calculating the percentage of grants awarded to students of color. Institutions that reported HEERF funds with more than one IPEDS Unit ID were not included.
