Michael Morgenstern for The ChronicleMichael Morgenstern for The Chronicle
Several years ago, a professor at Bard College invited me to meet with her class. I told her afterward that those students were among the strongest I had encountered in 30 years of teaching. They were prepared, inquisitive, and clearly invested in learning as much from me as they could.
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Michael Morgenstern for The ChronicleMichael Morgenstern for The Chronicle
Several years ago, a professor at Bard College invited me to meet with her class. I told her afterward that those students were among the strongest I had encountered in 30 years of teaching. They were prepared, inquisitive, and clearly invested in learning as much from me as they could.
They were also incarcerated. The students were part of the Bard Prison Initiative, which provides a college education to inmates in several correctional institutions. So do Goucher College, Grinnell College, and a handful of other colleges and universities around the country.
But they do so almost entirely with private dollars, because the federal government still bars prisoners from receiving Pell Grants to cover tuition costs. President Trump didn’t mention that issue in his otherwise laudable speech last week, in which he called for a range of important criminal-justice reforms, including the reduction of mandatory minimum sentences.
The best anti-recidivism program is education, of course. According to a 2013 Rand Corporation study, prisoners who had access to education were 43 percent less likely to return to prison within three years than those who did not.
Among students who complete a college degree, the effect is stronger still. Just 2 percent of prisoners getting a B.A. from Bard have returned to prison. Nationwide, the recidivism rate for offenders obtaining a college degree is 5.6 percent. So of 20 prisoners who get degrees, only one will go back to prison.
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That’s why we need to restore prisoners’ federal student aid, which was eliminated as part of the 1994 crime bill signed by President Bill Clinton. Since then members of both parties — including Clinton’s wife, Hillary — have bemoaned the mass incarceration triggered by the measure, especially its notorious “three strikes” mandatory life sentence for some repeat offenders.
But there’s been much less attention paid to the ban on Pell Grants for prisoners, which severely limits the number of incarcerated people who can obtain college degrees. About 10,000 prisoners have received student aid under the experimental Second Chance program, which the Obama administration began in 2015 in an effort to bypass the Pell restrictions. But there are about 2.2 million Americans behind bars. If we want more of them to get college degrees, we’ll have to eliminate the student-aid ban altogether.
Fortunately, there seems to be a growing bipartisan spirit to do just that. The Senate Education Committee’s chair, Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and a former secretary of education, has signaled his willingness to reinstate federal financial aid for prisoners. So has the committee’s ranking Democrat, Patty Murray, of Washington, who introduced legislation last year making inmates eligible for Pell Grants.
The idea has drawn qualified support from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who called reinstating student aid for prisoners “a very good and interesting possibility.” But we didn’t hear anything about it last week from President Trump, who instead hailed “vocational training, educational coursework, and faith-based programs” in his prison-reform speech.
To be sure, prisoners should have access to a wide range of educational choices. But the options referenced by Trump simply don’t have the same track record as full-degree college programs do. Vocational training, especially, too often prepares students for jobs that probably won’t exist in the near future.
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Indeed, in our so-called Age of Information, the most useful vocational education turns out to be a good liberal-arts education. That’s why three-quarters of surveyed business leaders in 2013 agreed that effective instruction in written and verbal communication was “the best way to prepare for success in today’s global economy.”
Not every prisoner in America will want a college degree, of course. But we should insist that every prisoner who seeks one remains eligible for federal student aid, just as other citizens are. Some voters will surely bridle at the prospect of their tax dollars’ assisting offenders. But we already do that by paying huge sums to imprison people over and over again. And the best way to ensure that they don’t go back to jail is by offering them help in going to college.
“Redemption is at the heart of the American idea,” President Trump said last week. But so is college, especially at this moment in our history. So let’s make sure prisoners can go to college, which is the most promising road to their redemption. And to ours.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (2016, Oxford University Press).
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools, which was published in a revised 20th-anniversary edition by the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2022.