Giving Compass' Take:

• Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) is partnering with various prisons to better serve incarcerated students and help them obtain degrees.  

• What role can donors play in expanding these types of programs? How can other states follow Iowa's example? 

• Read about the value of education access in prisons. 

Late last year, we walked into the Iowa Medical and Classification Center, or “Oakdale” as it’s known locally, named for the boulevard on which it is located in the quiet town of Coralville.

Oakdale is also a prison.

Courses range from “The Sociology of Sport” to “Songwriting and Singing in a Prison Choir” and are primarily taught in person through the University of Iowa or through an associate-degree program with Iowa Central Community College.

Similar to other correctional facilities, this Iowa prison disproportionately houses people of color, people from low socioeconomic backgrounds and people without college degrees. The American criminal justice system is filled with individuals from these underserved and marginalized groups, who stand to benefit from receiving high-quality educational opportunities.

Our criminal justice system contains the populations whom the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) was originally intended to reach. Since the Higher Education Act was enacted more than half a century ago, the landscape of higher education has shifted. Today, thanks to a sustained focus on equity, a more accessible postsecondary system is being realized, especially for students from historically marginalized groups.

HEA policies and programs continue to help more students attend and graduate from college, even those who are incarcerated. At the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), we are striving to make HEA more responsive to these students’ needs through full restoration of Pell grant eligibility, but we are also having critical conversations with correctional and postsecondary leaders about how to ensure academic rigor and quality for the growing number of students who are being educated while incarcerated.

Thanks to Iowa’s prison partnerships between IHEP and several higher education in-prison programs, including Oakdale and the University of Iowa’s Liberal Arts Beyond Bars, we are now focused on this underserved — and often invisible — group of students.

Read the full article about incarcerated students by Julie Ajinkya at The Hechinger Report.