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Luciano Lozano/Getty Images
NPR Education
Parsing The
'Free' In Free Community College
Anya Kamenetz
August 25, 2016
Let's say you have invites to two parties that advertise "free drinks!"
At the first party, there's simply an open bar. At the second party,
though, you have to bring in your tax return, fill out a long form, and
register to receive a cocktail grant in a given amount based on your
annual income.
Once those funds are drained, you can then become eligible for vouchers
to pay for further beverages up to a predetermined limit.
Which party sounds like more fun? Which will be better attended? And
which one is likely to be more expensive for the hosts?
As this experiment illustrates, the promise of "free" can mean very
different things in practice. And that has important implications for
one of the biggest policy debates in education right now: how best to
ease the cost of college tuition.
Sandy Baum, a longtime expert on the issue, and David Baime of the
American Association of Community Colleges, have just released a report
from the Urban Institute focusing on community colleges. "Community
colleges differ dramatically from place to place," Baum observes. When
proposing changes, "We have to take into consideration their different
starting points and different purposes and values."
If you want a free lunch, someone has to pick up the check. In order to
make community college free to students, someone, whether the state or
the federal government, needs to cover tuition.
And to understand how big of a change that would be and how much it
would cost, you have to understand how states are currently funding
community colleges and how much of the cost they're currently passing
along to students in the form of tuition.
Across the country, community colleges, like all public colleges, are
relying more and more on tuition as a source of funds.
In 2002-2003, one of four dollars spent by these two-year schools came
from tuition payments (which include federal and state grant aid). A
decade later, that percentage had risen to 39 percent.
But again, there are lots of local variations. "In some states there is
very little by way of state and local appropriations," Baum says.
The outlier among all of these is Vermont, the home state of Sen.
Bernie Sanders, a notable advocate of free college. Vermont's community
colleges have the highest tuition in the nation — $7,530. That's more
than some public four-year universities. They take in four and a half
times more money from students than they receive from the state.
Switching to a tuition-free model, clearly, would be a big change in
Vermont.
At the other end of the spectrum, California, which educates one out of
every five community college students nationwide, is predominantly
state-funded. California community colleges charge the lowest tuition
in the country: $1,420 for the academic year, the same at all colleges
statewide.
These wide differences from state to state make it harder to put
together a federal policy for lowering the tuition costs of community
colleges. As illustrated in the party example, a "free community
college" policy can be relatively cheap, simple or fair. But it's hard
to do all three.
Baum calls the Tennessee Promise, one of the most widely known state
initiatives for free community college, a "last-dollar policy." That
means students who are already eligible for Pell Grants must use them
to pay for school. After that money is gone, the state pledges to fill
in the gap.
This method is the cheapest for the state, since most community college
students have low enough earnings to be Pell-eligible, meaning they can
draw on federal money first before taking state aid. And it's fairly
simple for colleges as well, since they can still continue to charge
tuition.
However, says Baum, "if you come from an affluent family" that isn't
Pell-eligible, "the state will pay your tuition up front." And that
means, "The extra money is actually going to people who need it less."
By contrast, the Obama administration's proposal for free community
college, called America's College Promise, is what Baum calls a
"first-dollar" plan. In this scenario, the federal government pledges
to cover 75 percent of tuition and fees, with states agreeing to pick
up the remainder.
According to Baum, low-income students would, under this plan, still be
able to keep their Pell Grants to pay for living expenses. Depending on
location, those expenses can be many times the cost of community
college tuition alone.
Such a first-dollar plan is more like an open bar. Experts like Baum
say this approach is simple enough to actually raise participation in
community college, which is an important goal of all these policies.
And it is structured in such a way that more public assistance goes to
low-income students.
But the cost to taxpayers would be much higher, and such a program
would also vary wildly in its impact on state budgets, depending on how
and how much they currently support community colleges.
"It's easy to throw around phrases like 'free,' " says Baum. Harder to
work out the fine print.
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