Promise of free college might be an empty image for most
Gubernatorial candidates in Maryland, Arizona, Connecticut and at least seven other states — plus even more candidates for Congress — are running on plans to make college free or “debt-free,” according to the industry publication Inside Higher Ed.
But how much impact on college attendance, graduation and lifetime earnings do such programs actually have? There are no definitive answers, but some indicators aren’t exactly reassuring.
According to a study by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a nonprofit based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the underprivileged don’t get a lot out of college and, perversely, those who benefit most from a college degree turn out to be students with middleclass backgrounds.
The institute’s analysis of a data set that included 50 years of interviews with 18,000 Americans found that “the career earnings premium from a four-year college degree (relative to a high school diploma) for persons from low-income backgrounds is considerably less than it is for those from higher-income backgrounds ... [and] we find that education not only has much lower absolute returns for persons from low-income backgrounds, it also has much lower proportional returns.”
A small earnings boost, coupled with student loans that can never be discharged through bankruptcy, sounds like a raw deal to the first-intheir-family students who have been most encouraged, inspired and practically pushed into pursuing a college degree.
So while the campaignspeech catnip of free college sounds enticing to those who want a shot at a middle-class life, the benefits of a free educational lunch may be nothing more than a crowd-pleasing mirage.
A study by the Brookings Institution on one of the first randomized control trials of a debt-free college program looked at students in the Milwaukee Public Schools program who were promised up to $12,000 to pay for college — an amount that would cover all tuition and fees at the local two-year college or at most of the in-state four-year institutions. But the study found that the incentive had no effect on whether students went directly on to college from high school.
The programs didn’t randomly hand out free tuition like candy, either.
Students were required to graduate on time from a Milwaukee public high school with at least a 2.5 cumulative gradepoint average and a 90 percent class-attendance rate.
The students were also required to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which, because it requires parental tax information, often serves as a proxy for how much the student’s family supports their desire to attend college. Still, even though the students in the program did exhibit more motivation to attend college — and filled out more applications to college than they might have otherwise — the totality of the investment in getting the students across the finish line of a degree was not significant. In the end, only 21 percent of the students enrolled in The Degree Project with the Milwaukee schools met the performance requirements to unlock the college funds, basically the same as the control group.
As with so many other wellmeaning efforts to reduce inequalities in society, free college seems like it has great potential but requires far more pilot programs and longitudinal research.
Before making promises to young people, we must design programs that won’t have the unintended consequences of leaving needy students economically insecure after promising them that college is the ticket to a financially prosperous life.