Carnegie Mellon University once taught blacksmithing and drafting to laborers' sons. It fit the technical school's vision of giving Pittsburgh's mill workers a leg up on life.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Ariel Haughton, a junior at Allegheny College in Meadville, is from a low-income family and is getting a shot at a degree from a selective campus. Two-thirds of her $32,000 in yearly college costs are being covered by grants, campus aid and scholarships. Click photo for larger image. Online graphics Poor students losing ground, in .pdf format Trends in student aid

A century later, the place has blossomed into an elite campus where ever-more accomplished students push the envelope in fields from robotics to acting. But along the way it has lost something -- some of those needy students.

The poor are getting harder to find there and on other highly selective campuses nationwide, judging by the number receiving federal Pell Grants, which are targeted to low-income families. Since the early 1990s, the share of Carnegie Mellon undergraduates with them has declined from about 20 percent to 12 percent, or 256 fewer students with median family incomes of under $30,000.

It's an exodus that worries policy experts, even though schools like Carnegie Mellon say they are doing all they can to attract low-income students.

Theories abound to explain the trend -- from too little government aid to the disadvantaged to subpar preparation of students in poor school districts to decisions by prestige-driven colleges about who is admitted.

But most experts agree on what's at stake.

They warn of a society increasingly stratified by wealth since top schools often are a pathway to the most lucrative jobs. And they point out that even as those schools publicly tout gains in diversifying their campuses by race, they may be quietly losing another front in the war for campus access.

"We Americans like to portray ourselves as a country where you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps, where anybody can go from the furthest depths of poverty to become the president of a university or the president of the United States," said Robert Shireman, senior fellow with the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. "One indicator of the truth of that American ideal is the ability of low-income students to attend and succeed at institutions that tend to create those leaders -- the CEOs, the senators."

Just how scarce are the neediest students?

The Century Foundation found last year that individuals from the poorest quarter of the population comprised just 3 percent of the student bodies at the nation's most selective 146 schools. By contrast, 74 percent were from the richest quarter, as defined in terms of family income and parental education.

"Another way of putting that is you're 25 times as likely to run into a rich kid as a poor kid at the top 146 schools," said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow with the New York City think tank. "The students who tend to be at these schools are upper- and middle-class whites, blacks and Latinos."

Increasingly, said Tom Mortenson, a higher education policy analyst in Iowa who has studied Pell Grant data, poor students are headed to two-year community colleges and proprietary schools.

Nationwide, 60 percent of Pell recipients attended public and private four-year schools in the 1970s, but it's now closer to 45 percent "and dropping rapidly," he said. Among the nation's 50 public flagship universities, Mortenson found that 31, including the main campus of Penn State University, saw declines in the share of Pell holders between 1992 and 2002.

The number of Pell holders also declined at the University of Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania's largest public campus.

Mortenson said he doesn't believe yearly fluctuations in the Pell program could significantly account for the declines. The total number of recipients nationally varies annually but is estimated this year to be a record 5.3 million, up from 3.7 million a decade ago.

Mark Heffron, an executive with enrollment management consultant Noel-Levitz, said a formula change in the early 1990s dropped sizable numbers of Pell recipients from eligibility and would account for campus declines back then. But he said he would have expected the numbers to rebound as the national total of Pell recipients did by the end of the 1990s.

The income gap at many schools has policy analysts urging more focus on need-based aid. Some even go a step further by asking: If colleges routinely consider in their admission decisions things like race, athletic ability and even a parent's donation to the campus, then why not practice affirmative action based on income?

Who's to blame?

Some students say their dreams are at stake.

Ariel Haughton, 20, of Blawnox, whose single mother could afford only enough to pay for her daughter's books, nevertheless is getting a shot at a liberal arts degree from Allegheny College, which costs $32,000 a year.

She's getting $15,000 from Allegheny, plus Pell and state grants. That aid and private scholarship money is covering two-thirds of the bill, keeping the junior English major, who had a 4.2 grade average in high school, on track in her plans to become a teacher.

One measure of the income gap with her peers, she said, is how many bring cars to campus. She does not own one but is more worried these days about securing enough loan money to pay the rest of her college bill. She expects to graduate about $30,000 in debt.

"I don't think I could achieve any of the things I want to do in life if I wasn't here right now," said Haughton. "And I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for all this aid."

Likewise, Nasheena Porter, 19, of Linden, N.J., can thank financial aid including $20,000 from Carnegie Mellon, where she studies political science and philosophy. Porter, a sophomore, expects to be more than $20,000 in debt by graduation, but a step closer to one day practicing law.

"It was pretty tight," she said of her finances during her freshman year on the $40,000-a-year campus. "I'm not complaining."

But not enough students get such opportunities, experts say.

In fact, researchers at UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute recently reported that even with student financial aid initiatives and affirmative action, the wealthy accounted for an increasing share of enrollment in the top schools between 1985 and 2000. At the same time, the share of students from middle-income families and first-generation college students declined at those schools, while poor students gained almost no ground.

"American higher education, in other words, is more socioeconomically stratified today than at any time during the past three decades," researchers Alexander Astin and Leticia Oseguera concluded.

Mortenson lays much of the blame on school admission policies.

He says campuses obsess over high-achieving students who can enhance the school's standing in rankings like the one in U.S. News & World Report. And they prefer students from families better able to pay the bill and more likely to one day drop a wad of money on the school.

He said it's no secret that better-prepared students -- the ones liable to score 1400 and up on the SAT's -- tend to come from wealthier families.

"Profits and prestige," Mortenson said. "Everybody wants to be like Harvard."

Many campus officials, though, balk at that as unfair and too simplistic. Sure, they say, schools vie for top students and enjoy record numbers of applications. But other factors discourage qualified-but-disadvantaged students from even applying.

Financial aid, for one, isn't growing as fast as college prices and increasingly comes in loans, which are a particular barrier to the poor, experts say. A shift from need-based scholarships to those based on academic merit tends to benefit better-prepared and usually wealthier students, as do tuition tax credits, which are less beneficial as family income declines.

Then there's the Pell Grant itself, whose maximum award has remained at $4,050 the last couple years and has lost half the purchasing power it had during the program's early years, financial aid officers say. It hardly makes a dent on a top campus where the sticker price can exceed $30,000 or even $40,000 a year.

New approaches

At Carnegie Mellon, Bill Elliott, vice president for enrollment, said his school works hard to identify prospects from poor backgrounds, but finding them is harder than it once was. He points to a summer science academy for promising but disadvantaged high school students as just one example of his school's outreach.

Carnegie Mellon, he said, allocates ever-more financial aid to students, including its 637 Pell grant recipients this year.

"Obviously, we wish we were more successful, but we've been successful to the extent that there are 637 of these students here," he said. "It's increasingly expensive because the feds have walked from the Pell commitment by not increasing the grant."

He said Carnegie Mellon does consider income in admissions and invests $30 million in financial aid, nearly all of it based on need. But, as is true at other schools, recipients often have family incomes far above the Pell Grant cutoff. The median family income for financial aid recipients there is $75,000, Elliott said.

"I've only got so much financial aid," said Elliott, noting that Carnegie Mellon's endowment is a fraction of its peers'. "I'm doing the best I can with what I've got."

Betsy Porter, Pitt's director of admissions and financial aid, wondered if the decline in Pell recipients on her campus from 24 percent to 21 percent, or 684 fewer than in the early 1990s, is linked to a decline in part-time students during the 1990s or perhaps a Pell formula change. She said Pitt recruiters aggressively seek qualified applicants regardless of family income and "certainly are not targeting more affluent areas for recruitment purposes."

At Penn State, Anna Griswold doesn't dispute that there are nearly 500 fewer Pell grant recipients on the main campus. But she said Mortenson ignores the branch campuses. If they are included, she said, many more are actually being served.

"The culprit is not Penn State and its selectivity. I would say it's the inequality of our nation's public school system, K-12," said Griswold, assistant vice provost for enrollment management. "If you're poor, you're probably going to be living in a poorer neighborhood with poorer schools. It may mean you come out less prepared to compete."

Promoting access is important, she and others say. But so is being realistic about an applicant's chances for success on a highly competitive campus.

"You do these students no favors if you bring them in, and then don't help them achieve their dreams," said Shirley Ort, director of scholarships and student aid at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that state's public flagship, where 13 percent of undergraduates hold Pell grants.

That said, her school has overhauled financial aid policy to ensure that more low-income students can afford to enroll. Under its "Carolina Covenant," qualified needy students are guaranteed a debt-free education if they work 10 to 12 hours weekly on campus.

Princeton University made headlines a few years back by announcing that the Ivy League campus would replace loans with grants for low-income students and reduce debt for the middle class. Other schools have made similar moves.

And still others are taking a hard look at the issue as the income gap on their campuses grows.

In 1990, students in the top one-fifth of family incomes (above $83,000 a year) made up 30.6 percent of in-state freshmen at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said Steve Van Ess, who directs financial aid services there. Now, it's 38.4 percent.

"It's uneven, and it's getting more uneven," he said. "We see it, to some extent, as a problem, something we'd like to change."

Sandy Baum, senior policy analyst with The College Board, said what Mortenson and other researchers have hit on is indeed worrisome. It's reasonable to ask, she said, just what difference does being at a top school make, and who benefits most?

"If you come from an affluent, educated family you are going to have all kinds of opportunities, so where you go to college probably matters less," she said. "But if you come from an environment where you haven't been exposed to extensive opportunities, then the world that gets opened up to you can change your life in a really dramatic way."