When President Joe Biden unveiled the details of his Plan B for student loan forgiveness, he revealed that his hope to make college free wasn’t dead.
“I also want to make community college tuition free so you don’t need any loans,” Biden said after including free community college as part of his $7.3 trillion budget for fiscal 2025.
Unlike loan forgiveness, free college is a better way to combat the college affordability crisis, some experts say — and although a federal effort hasn’t yet begun, it could have a good chance of being secured broad approval going forward.
“Student loan forgiveness is a help,” said Ryan Morgan, CEO of the Campaign for Free College Tuition. “It’s not a permanent solution, but it’s certainly better than nothing.”
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Critics have focused on the president’s efforts to write off loans for exceeding his authority while only affecting those graduates with existing education debt.
“Loan forgiveness is a point in time from a repair standpoint,” Morgan said.
Alternatively, free college appeals more broadly to those struggling in the face of rising college costs, rather than after the fact.
“If you remove cost as a barrier, then everyone who wants to and is qualified to go can attend some kind of higher education program,” Morgan said.
“That makes it ‘a very popular bipartisan issue,'” he added.
And yet, the Biden administration’s plan to make community college tuition-free for two years was ultimately removed from the Build Back Better Act in 2021.
But while the White House has turned its focus to student loan forgiveness, states are moving forward with plans to pass their own legislation to make some universities tuition-free.
At last count, 35 states already have some kind of program.
Most are “last dollar” scholarships, meaning the program pays for whatever tuition and fees remain after financial aid and other scholarships are applied. In other words, students receive a scholarship for the amount of tuition not covered by existing state or federal aid.
The problem with free college
Critics say low-income students, through a combination of existing scholarships and grants, already pay little, if any, in public school tuition.
“The reality is there’s a very good chance you won’t pay tuition,” said Sandy Baum, senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center for Education Data and Policy. “That doesn’t really solve an access problem.”
Additionally, in most cases the money does not cover tuition, books, or room and board, which are all expenses that lower-income students struggle with, and Community college may not be the stepping stone to a four-year school that it is often thought to be.
In fact, just 16% of all community college students go on and earn a degree, according to recent reports from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, the Aspen Institute’s Program for College Excellence, and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
“It’s a really risky way to think you’re going to save money because very few people go on to get a degree,” Baum said.
Plus, community college is already significantly less expensive. At two-year public schools, tuition and fees average $3,990 for the 2023-24 school year, according to the College Board. Alternatively, at four-year public schools in the state, that number is $11,260 per year, and, at four-year private universities, it is $41,540.
The New Mexico program is our “gold star”
Among all the state plans, the New Mexico Opportunity Scholarship Act has been hailed as the most extensive tuition-free scholarship program in the country — “that’s our gold star as far as programs go,” Morgan said.
of New Mexico Opportunity Scholarship goes one step further than most by opening access to returning adult students, part-time students and immigrants, regardless of immigration status, in addition to recent high school graduates. (The average scholarship recipient in New Mexico is under 25, female and Hispanic.)
In New Mexico, state aid is applied first, so federal aid and private scholarships can go toward books, room and board, and child care to cover the total cost of going to school.
Since it began in 2022, total college enrollment has increased by nearly 7 percent in the state, reversing more than a decade of declines, according to Department of Higher Education Secretary Stephanie Rodriguez.
This “tells us that students are ready to go to school, they want to be there and they want to upgrade or upgrade their skills,” he said.
“It’s gratifying to see that the scholarship is doing exactly what it was intended to do,” Rodriguez added.