In a report published last week, Jen Mishory, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, sheds some light on an oft-debated topic in education circles: Do the benefits of "free college" programs outweigh the costs?
There has been a proliferation of state-level "free college" programs in recent years. In 2014, Tennessee rolled out its Tennessee Promise initiative, which covers tuition and fees for all recent high school graduates at state community colleges and technical schools. Since then, eight additional states—New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Montana, Minnesota, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Nevada—have introduced similar programs. (Tennessee also extended its tuition guarantee last year to adult learners.) These programs vary in their specifics, but they share a couple of crucial characteristics: They offer free tuition and they're not merit-based, meaning more students are eligible for them.
Many of these initiatives cover a higher-income group of students than those typically eligible for Pell grants or other means-tested forms of financial aid. There are pros and cons to these programs. The biggest drawback is cost: They're expensive. What's more, they may ultimately increase state spending on wealthier students, who are often more likely, for a range of reasons, to go to college.
[For more on this story by DWYER GUNN, go to https://psmag.com/education/wh...ograms-so-successful]
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