More Students Will Leave Prison With College Credit. Are Colleges Ready?

Since 2015, more than 22,000 incarcerated people have taken college courses through a federal experiment that has offered Pell Grants to inmates in select programs. Thousands more will become eligible for the grants this summer, when a law lifting a 1994 ban on awarding Pell funds to prisoners takes effect. That expansion is expected to lead to a boom in the number of colleges offering prison-education programs, and the number of students participating in them.