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Revisiting Student Access Through the Lens of Regional Public Universities

ByBlake Decker

As the calendar flipping to August signifies the end of summer break for students and faculty alike, our “Summer of Carnegie” series will come to an end this month as well. The past few months have seen us walk through data pertaining to the new 2025 Carnegie Classification system, including new Research Activity Designations and Student Access and Earnings Classification (SAEC) metrics. Our data lens has also focused on new frameworks that were used as part of the SAEC metrics, specifically the Regional Public Universities (RPUs) designations and Rural-Serving Institutions (RSIs) status developed by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges (ARRC) Our previous post dug into quantitative differences between RPUs and Non-RPUs, finding that more than 85% of the 115 numerical variables showed a meaningful difference (Cohen’s d ≥ 0.2) between RPU and non-RPU institutions, with 60% of those variables showing large effect sizes (Cohen’s d ≥ 0.8).

While Access and Earnings are a presented together in Carnegie’s schema, this blog post will focus on Student Access by continuing our comparisons of RPU and non-RPU institutions based on Carnegie’s SAEC framework. As a reminder, the Access Measure evaluates whether institutions are enrolling a student population that is representative of the locations they serve, while the Earnings Measure compares median post-attendance earnings as reported by the College Scorecard to earnings of people ages 22-40 who hold a high school diploma or higher in an institution’s region. As we see in the visualization below, significant and meaningful differences exist between Regional Public Universities and Non-RPUs in terms of student access while enrolled at their institutions. (Note: Full definitions for these constructs are provided at the end of the blog post.)

student Access: a defining characteristic of regional Public Universities

  • In the visualization below, we see the distribution of Student Access Scores by RPU status for institutions in the ARRC data. Because Student Access Score is a ratio value, where the percentage of Pell grant awardees and students from underrepresented race/ethnicity categories were compared to the general population in the institution’s region, a value above 1.0 indicates the institution had a higher value than the geography-based comparison group, while a score below 1.0 means the institution had a value lower than the comparison group.
  • When comparing the average scores by RPU status, we see that the average Access Score for RPUs (1.36) was almost 60-percent higher than the average Access Score (0.86) for Non-RPU institutions.
    • Pell Grant Awardees: On average, 41.1% of undergraduate students at RPU institutions received Pell Grants, which was 25% greater representation than the low-income (as per federal poverty guidelines) adults in the comparison group. At Non-RPU institutions, 25.7% of undergrads received Pell Grants, which was 16% lower representation than low-income adults in the comparison group.
    • Underrepresented Minority Students: On average, 41.3% of students at RPU institutions were from underrepresented minority groups, which was 48% higher than the racial/ethnic composition of adults in the comparison group. At Non-RPU institutions, 30.9% of students were from underrepresented minority groups, which was 11% lower representation than racial/ethnic composition of adults in the comparison group.
  • This means that the average RPU institution provided higher levels of access to low-income students and students from underrepresented race/ethnicity groups than would be expected, based on the comparison demographics within each institution’s region. Conversely, the average Non-RPU institution had lower representation from low-income and underrepresented race/ethnicity groups when compared to comparison group in the ARRC analysis.

Institutional Exemplars in providing student access

  • Out of the 31 Texas public universities included in the RPU metrics, 9 of them had Student Access Scores above the average for RPUs of 1.36. Eight of those institutions were classified as RPUs, with University of Texas at Arlington (1.38) the only Non-RPU that was above the mean Access Score for RPUs.
  • Texas Southern University had the highest Access Score for Texas public universities at 2.05, followed by Prairie View A&M University (1.87) and Sul Ross State University (1.81). The other Texas RPU institutions above the average were University of Houston-Downtown (1.51), Texas Woman’s University (1.50), Midwestern State University (1.48), Texas State University (1.46), and Texas A&M University-Texarkana (1.36).
  • Across these 8 RPUs, 52% of students received Pell Grant awards in the ARRC data, while less than 34% of adults in the comparison groups were considered to be low income. This means that there were 53% more low-income students at these 8 RPU institutions than would have been expected based on the percentage of low-income adults in the regions these universities serve.

So What?

As we discussed in our previous blog post, we can measure group mean differences using Cohen’s d. In the case of Student Access Scores, the Cohen’s d value of 1.14 indicated a strong effect size. This strong effect size represents significant and meaningful differences between the average RPU and Non-RPU in terms of providing higher levels of student access when compared to the demographics of the regions that institutions serve. This finding supports our other data posts comparing RPU and Non-RPU institutions that have shown that RPUs and Non-RPUs are quantitatively different entities across a large swath of variables in the ARRC data. On the Access Measure, RPU institutions appear to provide more opportunities for low-income students and students from underrepresented minority populations to earn college-level credentials. Do large differences between RPU and Non-RPU institutions continue when looking at Student Earnings measures? We will answer that question in our next blog post.

data definitions

  • Access Measure: The Access Measure evaluates whether institutions are enrolling a student population that is representative of the locations they serve. Enrollment of undergraduate students by Pell grant status and underrepresented race/ethnicity were used to determine student population values. The institution-level data were then contextualized by comparing those data to location-based variables for the general population within each institution’s region of service (Carnegie Classification).
  • Earnings Measure: Economic outcomes were measured by comparing median post-attendance earnings as reported by the College Scorecard to earnings of people ages 22-40 who hold a high school diploma or higher in an institution’s region. Recognizing that student data are variable based on context, earnings data were analyzed based on the geographical and racial/ethnic composition of the student body (Carnegie Classification).