More than 19.9 million students are taking classes at colleges and universities across the United States this semester, up from 14.9 million two decades ago, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
As enrollment has swelled, so has the price of college. The average combined cost of undergraduate tuition, fees, room and board at four-year schools has doubled since 2000. The average cost of attendance for full-time students living on campus at an in-state, public college or university during the 2017-18 academic year totaled $24,320. It totaled $50,338 at private institutions.
Heavy student debt loads created America’s student loan crisis. A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that outstanding student loan debt topped $1.6 trillion in the U.S. during the second quarter of 2019.
State and federal lawmakers and 2020 presidential candidates have put forward a range of plans aimed at reducing college costs to curb student debt and encourage more Americans to pursue degrees. Most programs and proposals focus on eliminating tuition at community colleges and state universities. But some also aim to cover educational costs such as mandatory student fees, which schools charge to help pay for student events, health services and other campus offerings.
These initiatives often are referred to as "free college" — even when they only cover tuition — and as "tuition-free" programs. A number of cities, counties and states have introduced “college promise” programs, which also pay students’ tuition and, sometimes, other expenses at two- and four-year institutions.
Recent research indicates there are hundreds of college promise programs in the U.S. Some are small, serving students in a city or public school district. Others are open to students across a state. In 2015, Tennessee became the first state in the country to offer free tuition at all of its community colleges and technical schools with its Tennessee Promise Scholarship. Earlier this month, officials in San Antonio announced AlamoPROMISE, which will allow students who graduate from one of 25 local high schools to receive 60 credits worth of free tuition at five area community colleges starting in fall 2020.
New York’s Excelsior Scholarship, launched in 2017, is the nation’s first statewide program to provide free tuition at state-funded two- and four-year colleges. The program is open to New York residents who have a household income of $125,000 or less and agree to live and work in New York for the same amount of time they receive the scholarship.
To help journalists understand the implications and impacts of these efforts, we’ve gathered and summarized a sampling of research on "free college," "tuition-free" and "college promise" programs. Because most programs are relatively new, scholars are continuing to study them. We will add new research to this collection as it is published or released.
Also check out these five tips for reporting on free college and college promise programs from Laura Perna, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania who’s also executive director of its Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy.
Merit Aid, College Quality, and College Completion: Massachusetts’ Adams Scholarship as an In-Kind Subsidy
Cohodes, Sarah R; Goodman, Joshua S. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2014.
This study examines a Massachusetts program that offers tuition waivers to high-achieving students who graduated from Massachusetts public high schools. The waivers, a key component of the John and Abigail Adams Scholarship Program, cover the cost of tuition for up to eight semesters at any Massachusetts state college or university.
The key takeaway: While the scholarship induced some of these students to remain in Massachusetts for college — a primary goal of the program — it reduced college completion rates, find the authors, Sarah Cohodes, an associate professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of economics at Brandeis University. After the program started, about 200 fewer Massachusetts high school graduates per year earned college degrees.
Cohodes and Goodman find that each scholarship, valued at less than $7,000, encouraged students with high test scores to attend in-state public colleges and universities, which “were of lower quality than the average alternative available to such students.” Going to a lower quality school is associated with higher odds of dropping out, possibly because public institutions spend substantially less on instruction than private, non-profit colleges, the authors suggest. They analyzed a variety of data on Massachusetts students who graduated high school between 2005 and 2008, tracking them through 2012.
“The scholarship, though relatively small in monetary value, induced substantial changes in college choice,” Cohodes and Goodman write. “College completion rates decreased only for those subsets of students forgoing the opportunity to attend higher quality colleges when accepting the scholarship. We describe the magnitude of this response as remarkable because the value of the scholarship is dwarfed by estimates of the forgone earnings of attending a lower quality college or failing to graduate.”
