Crafting A Class: The Trade Off Between Merit Scholarships and Enrolling Lower-Income Students

Our paper uses institutional-level panel data to testwhether an increase in the number of institutionally funded National Merit Scholarship (NMS) winners at an institution isassociated with a reduction in the number of Pell Grant recipients at the institution. We find that, other factors held constant, an increase in the share of institutionally funded NMS winners in an institution's first-year class is associated with a reduction in the share of Pell Grant recipients among the institution's undergraduate student body and that the magnitude of this relationship is larges at the institutions that enroll the greatest number of NMS students.