Pennsylvania’s Education Tax Credit Scholarships: How EITC Serves Children and Families In the Commonwealth | 2nd Edition

Key Findings

• Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) are state tax credit programs that provide over 100,000 students from low- to middle-income families access to high-quality schools of their choice.
• Scholarship organizations awarded 101,751 K-12 scholarships in 2023-24, up 16,181 from the previous year.
• Unfortunately, the demand for scholarships outpaces the supply. Tax credit caps, set each year by the state legislature, forced scholarship organizations to deny close to 69,000 student scholarship applications.
• This year marks the 25th birthday of the EITC program, one of the oldest programs in the nation. Since its inception in 2001, over 1 million scholarship awards have given Pennsylvania students an “opportunity to succeed.”
• Currently, students in all 67 counties attend a K–12 private school on an EITC or OSTC scholarship.
• Effective July 1, 2025, Pennsylvania law requires schools and/or scholarship organizations to collect added data on scholarship recipients, including whether they have a disability; their school district of residence; and the school attended in the previous year. The
• The largest Catholic diocese in terms of population in Pennsylvania—the Archdiocese of Philadelphia—distributes the most EITC scholarships in Pennsylvania. Archdiocesan data indicates that tax credit scholarships empower low-income families in low-achieving schools with an alternative education for their children. Most families receiving tax credit scholarships earn below the median income level for their respective counties, and, among its five counties, those with the most low-achieving public schools have the highest number of scholarship recipients.

Introduction

Tax credit scholarship programs fulfill a core need for low- to middle-income students in Pennsylvania. The data in this report demonstrates the unmet demand for the EITC and OSTC programs. Expanding tax credit scholarships, along with other new state and federal scholarship programs, are vital to improving access to educational opportunity for the children and families of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.