Free Tuition Is Most Effective as Marketing Strategy

Phillip Levine has been warning the sector for years that higher ed’s high sticker prices dissuade low- and middle-income students from applying to college, even though, with the help of financial aid, they’d likely be able to afford it.

Now, Levine said, the “fast and furious” movement of colleges offering free tuition to families whose household income is below a certain threshold has begun to alleviate that problem, and it’s not necessarily because institutions are handing out more financial aid.

In a new paper on free tuition policies from the Brookings Institution, Levine, a Brookings senior fellow, argues that the policies’ greatest value lies in the message they send to prospective students and their families: that they can afford to go to college. Levine’s analysis found that the students most likely to benefit from free tuition policies typically come from families with incomes right below the eligibility threshold.

“Their main contribution is a one-sentence communication device to get across the point that college might be less expensive than you think,” Levine told Inside Higher Ed. “For many students, it’s just communicated to them the assistance of financial aid that already existed. They already would have gotten free tuition—they just didn’t know it.”

Levine said that these policies are more important than ever given the increasingly restrictive landscape of college admissions.

“I think part of the impetus for greater reliance on these sorts of policies was the Supreme Court decision in the affirmative action case,” said Levine, who is also an economics professor at Wellesley College. “One thing that, at the moment, still is legal is the consideration of socioeconomic status.”

Despite all the benefits they offer, Levine said, free tuition policies are still “very crude.” He said colleges need to be super clear about what exactly their free tuition policies cover. Even if a program covers the full cost of tuition, families could still be left owing thousands of dollars for room and board, travel, books, and other expenses.

“Free tuition doesn’t mean free. Free tuition means free tuition,” Levine said. “This clearly is not the end of the story for what colleges need to do in terms of messaging, but it’s certainly a first step.”

Some colleges, such as Rice University in Texas, go beyond free tuition for certain students. The Rice Investment program fully covers tuition and living expenses for students from families making less than $100,000 per year. For students from families making less than $200,000, the program covers full tuition, and students may still receive scholarships or grants that bring down the cost of everything else.

Yvonne Romero, vice president for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid at Rice, said by using annual income—a number families typically know or can easily find out—Rice can communicate with prospective students and their families before they even apply.

Before Rice launched this initiative, students would see the sticker price—about $97,000, including fees and living expenses—and “often take themselves out of the mix without fully realizing that they would be eligible for considerable financial aid,” Romero said.

Colby College in Maine also offers financial aid through a sort of tiered system it calls the Colby Commitment. Colby’s program relies on a family’s income bracket to determine the maximum they can be expected to contribute, which is at most $20,000 per year for families making between $150,000 and $200,000.

Randi Maloney, dean of admissions at Colby, said the college’s financial aid budget has grown substantially since the program launched in 2018. The initiative opened the door for many students who may have previously thought of Colby as unaffordable, and it’s changed the way others approach the process, Maloney said.

“When they feel more empowered and they feel like cost is something that is not going to be a significant barrier, we get different questions,” Maloney said. “We get questions that are deeper and about other things than just ‘Can I make this work?’ They’re about the intricacies of what we offer and how we’ll support them in preparing for life beyond Colby.”