As college admission decisions pour in and students weigh their options, some institutions are putting the poorest students at a surprising disadvantage: There are 17 colleges and universities where the lowest-income students may end up paying more out of pocket than the highest-income ones.

At these 17 colleges and universities in 2020-21, students from families earning under $30,000 actually paid more in net price – which is the amount students pay after discounts and financial aid – than those from families making $110,000 a year or more, the latest available federal data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) showed.

The additional amount ranged from just $152 at Texas College in Tyler, Texas, to more than $5,000 at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. Those figures reflect what was paid by students in the lowest-income quintile compared with what was paid by students in the highest-income quintile.

The 17 institutions are spread across 14 states; two are public universities. Generous financial aid to the higher-income students often accounts for the difference.

All but one of these 17 are among the 700 universities across the U.S. where the net price has risen more for the lowest-income students over the last decade than for their higher-income peers, as USA Today and The Hechinger Report reported recently. (At Mississippi Valley State University, the price declined for both groups but dropped significantly more for the highest-income students.)

Trends in net price by income and other information about universities and colleges nationwide can be found in The Hechinger Report’s newly updated Tuition Tracker.

At Brenau, the lowest-income students paid $24,640 out of pocket in 2020-21 after all the discounts, grants, and scholarships. This was over $5,000 more than what the highest-income students had to pay. Lowest-income students at Brenau, in fact, have paid more in net price than highest-income ones every year since 2017-18, and the gap has been more than $3,000 in all those years.

Read the full article about inequities in college financial aid by Fazil Khan at The Hechinger Report.