Lois Rice Helped Create Pell Grants for Low-Income College Students

By James R. Hagerty 

Lois Dickson Rice, a daughter of Jamaican immigrants, helped develop the Pell grants that provide tuition money for low-income college students across the U.S. She also was among the first wave of African-American women serving on boards of major U.S. corporations.

Ms. Rice played a large role in shaping and lobbying for the 1972 legislation that created Basic Educational Opportunity Grants, renamed Pell grants to honor the bill's sponsor, Sen. Claiborne Pell, a Rhode Island Democrat. The program "would not have come into existence without her," said Clay Pell IV, a former U.S. Education Department official and a grandson of Sen. Pell.

She served as a senior vice president and director of Control Data Corp., a maker of computers. She also was a director of McGraw-Hill Inc., Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. and Fleet Financial Group Inc., among other companies. Her daughter, Susan Rice, served as national security adviser to President Obama.

The elder Ms. Rice died Jan. 4 at a hospital in Washington, D.C. She was 84 and had cancer.

Lois Ann Dickson, the youngest of five children, was born Feb. 28, 1933, in Portland, Maine. Her mother worked as a maid and did laundry for wealthy families. Her father worked as a janitor and elevator operator at a music store. While moonlighting as a bartender at a Bowdoin College alumni event, he heard good things about the school. All four of his sons later attended Bowdoin. Three became medical doctors. A fourth, David Dickson, earned a doctorate at Harvard University and served as president of what is now Montclair State University.

Lois Dickson attended Radcliffe College in the early 1950s and earned a bachelor's degree in history and literature.

"My parents were very motivated people, especially in terms of educating their children," Ms. Rice told the Portland Press Herald in 2008. Her father, she said, "mortgaged and re-mortgaged our home to put us through college."

She was a vice president of the College Entrance Examination Board in the early 1970s when she pushed for what became the Pell grant program. In 1992, she became a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, where she focused on education policy. She was a member of President Clinton's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Her son, E. John Rice, is the founder and chief executive of Management Leadership for Tomorrow, a nonprofit that helps minorities prepare to be leaders. Her marriage to Emmett Rice, an economics professor who served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, ended in divorce. Her second husband, Alfred Fitt, who was general counsel at the Congressional Budget Office, died in 1992.

She is survived by her two children, four stepchildren and four grandchildren.

Write to James R. Hagerty at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 20, 2017 05:44 ET (10:44 GMT)

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