If the Higher Education Act is reauthorized this year, Congress will have an opportunity to modernize the Pell grant program, which makes college more affordable for low-income students. A tool from the Urban Institute makes it possible to simulate the effects of modifications to the Pell program to see how program costs and grant amounts would change and which students would be affected. Users can change the program’s generosity within the current formula or experiment with a simplified system.
The simulator can be obtained at https://apps.urban.org/features/pell-simulator/.