After decades of waiting, incarcerated students are starting to receive Pell Grants to put toward a handful of new higher ed programs in prisons.
Congress moved to restore the federal financial aid to incarcerated students three years ago after these students were barred from accessing the grants for 26 years. The policy shift officially took effect last summer, marking a milestone for such students and their advocates.
But the multistep federal process to approve new programs for Pell Grants has taken time. Recent federal regulations to become an official Pell-Eligible Program, or PEP, require new college-in-prison programs to be approved by state corrections agencies, the federal Bureau of Prisons or a sheriff, an accreditor, and the U.S. Department of Education. The more than 200 colleges and universities that already participated in Second Chance Pell, a 2015 pilot program that allowed incarcerated students access to Pell Grants at select institutions, couldn’t expand their programs until they went through this approval process as well.
Central Oregon Community College was among the first institutions to earn approval for a brand-new Pell-eligible program, a three-year associate of arts degree offered at Deer Ridge Correctional Institution, to help incarcerated students more easily transfer to Oregon four-year universities upon release. After the program earned accreditation in December 2023, the college applied for it to become an official prison education program.
The associate degree program started this spring with an inaugural cohort of 18 students while staff anxiously waited to hear back from the U.S. Department of Education about its Pell eligibility. In the meantime, the program was temporarily funded by a state grant meant to tide over college-in-prison programs until Pell dollars came through. The community college received notice this summer that the program was approved—and, as a result, would survive into the fall.
Inside Higher Ed spoke with Emma Chaput, transfer degree program lead and a biology professor at Central Oregon, about what access to Pell Grants means for the future of her program and its students. The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell me a little bit about the impetus behind this new transfer degree program. What inspired you to launch it?
A: This happened very serendipitously as a result of some opportunities that I had during a sabbatical in 2022. That coincided with the reinstatement of Pell eligibility. So, during my sabbatical, one project that I was hoping to pursue was to teach a class at Deer Ridge, and then when I started having conversations with people in Oregon and around the country who do higher ed in prison, the scope of my hopes for COCC presence at Deer Ridge expanded. And then one of the last things that I did on sabbatical was attend a summer residency with the Bard Prison Initiative at Bard College in New York, and that two weeks was transformative and really inspired me to return to Oregon and commit to doing what I could to move us towards an associate degree program at Deer Ridge by pursuing Pell funding.
I had a conversation with the COCC president, Dr. Laurie Chesley, and she was supportive of my looking into whether we could do this. I continued to work with people around the state and instructional administration, and nobody said no. There continued to be support.
Q: Pell restoration officially went into effect last summer, but it’s taken longer than that for applications to go through and for the funds to materialize. What was the application process like for you to become a Pell-eligible program?
A: The application itself did not feel particularly onerous in terms of what we had to submit to the Education Department. A lot of what we submitted was very similar to what we submitted to the state Department of Corrections. I think one of the biggest challenges, and the delays, were simply that nobody really had the structures in place to do the required steps.
So, for example, when the first few colleges in Oregon submitted their applications to the state Department of Corrections, the committee to review the applications didn’t exist yet. So, they had to form those committees. And Oregon is far ahead of many other states in terms of the state Department of Corrections … having an application and being prepared to review those applications. And then, similarly, the accreditors just haven’t had a lot of experience with evaluating higher ed–in–prison programs. So I think a lot of the delays were simply that everybody was trying to figure out, how do we do this?
Q: How did it feel to find out that the program was approved this summer?
A: Very relieving. Because it had been such a long time, I was very concerned that we weren’t going to have funding for fall. And if we did not have federal funding, I was going to have to start looking in the couch cushion, just to be able to make sure that we could continue to have some programming. So, I think relieved was first, but then also really excited to be one of the first in the country, and I think the first program that was newly launched to get through the process [in Oregon]. I am so grateful for the broad support throughout the college because without the full support of our student services, financial aid, admissions and records, all of these people just wanting to expand educational opportunities for this new student population, we wouldn’t be able to be where we are.
Q: What does this development mean to your students? How did they react to the news?
A: They were super excited [and] probably happy that I was less stressed about it. And for the students to be able to, for example, complete the FAFSA, this means that they have that experience so that … they know how to complete the FAFSA in the future, and they will be better positioned to continue their education if they choose to postrelease … Students express they’re very grateful for the program in general, and the Pell funding is related to that, because that’s what makes it happen. That’s what enables them to be able to be engaging as college students.
Q: What was the FAFSA process like for them?
A: We’ve developed a process so you can complete the FAFSA online, just as all other students do. And so, one of our financial aid advisers, Beth Wright, joined me at Deer Ridge, and we walked through the FAFSA process for students. It involves a little bit of extra hoop jumping since the multifactor authentication process that people have to go through, our students don’t have access to email or cellphones, so the state Department of Corrections has a workaround. They create an email address that we can access … For some students, getting access to some of the documents is challenging. For example, do you have your 2022 tax return? That is not accessible for some students. And so sometimes there are challenges getting paperwork. But over all, many students had it completed in 15 minutes. It was amazing.
Q: What will it mean for your program going forward to have access to this funding? What’s going to change for you and your students?
A: This program exists because of the reinstatement of Pell.
There are many higher ed–in–prison programs that have been in existence for years and have been doing really great work, and they have other funding streams, either philanthropic, through endowments, through grants … It just so happens that again, serendipity, the timing of when I had sabbatical opportunities, Pell reinstatement and COCC support means that we were able to do this more quickly, because I didn’t have to identify alternative funding streams.
Q: How’s the program going so far?
A: Great. All of the students who started are still there, and this is now their third term … other than the one student who [was] released. They’re working really well as a cohort.
There are students who have described reconnecting with family members as a result of this program. One student has an adult daughter who is also in college, and they had some challenges in their relationship with him being incarcerated, but their shared experience as students has reconnected them and they talk every day.
And other students … [who] really left school in any meaningful way by the eighth grade, and now in their mid-30s realize that, No. 1, they’re really good at being students, and No. 2, they really like it. So, [the program is] really transforming how they see themselves in terms of education, and then [provides] just the very practical opportunity to engage with people as people, to be treated and treat others with humanity, as opposed to [as] a state ID number … Our mission is high-quality higher ed throughout our community, and acknowledging that these people are members of our community helps us be a little more aware of how we might serve those needs … I just hope more folks think about how higher ed might play a role in the in the carceral setting … We hear about the school-to-prison pipeline. Perhaps we can reframe that as the prison-to-college pipeline.