President Biden’s plan to make two years of community college free, which could make college more affordable and accessible to millions of Americans, is being praised as a long-overdue step forward. But depending on how it’s structured, some experts also caution that it could end up hurting disadvantaged students by diverting them to colleges where they’re less likely to succeed, and that it could provide free tuition to those who can already afford it.
The American Families Plan, which Biden unveiled on Wednesday and was expected to highlight in a speech before a joint session of Congress, includes $109 billion for two years of free community college, for “first-time students and workers wanting to reskill.” Democrats have been promoting the idea for years, and President Barack Obama proposed making community college free for millions in 2015. With their party narrowly controlling both the House and the Senate, as well as the presidency, the measure’s chances of passage are much stronger today than six years ago. Still, the costly proposal, which is a key feature of a $1.8-trillion economic-stimulus package, is likely to draw steep resistance from Republicans.
Some progressives argue it doesn’t go far enough; they’d like to see four, not just two, years of tuition-free college. Others say that if it doesn’t include income requirements for recipients, it will give away too much, providing free tuition to students from families who can afford to pay.
Some experts also worry about the potential impact of giving students incentives to not start in a four-year college. They argue that students who start out in community colleges — including minority and first-generation students — are less likely to end up with four-year degrees, largely because many of their credits fall through the cracks when they transfer to a four-year institution. Studies have shown that about 80 percent of students entering community colleges plan to earn a bachelor’s degree, but fewer than 15 percent end up with one.
“If free community college is a reality, it’s possible even more students will enter and even more students will be stymied in their pursuit of a bachelor’s degree,” said Loni Bordoloi Pazich, program director of the Teagle Foundation.
The Biden plan includes extra money — $39 billion — to address such concerns. It would provide two years of subsidized tuition to historically Black colleges, tribal colleges, and other minority-serving institutions for students from families earning less than $125,000 a year.
It also would provide more money directly to low-income students and to bolster supports at community colleges. It would set aside more than $80 billion to raise the maximum Pell Grant, for the nation’s lowest-income students, by $1,400. That would bring the maximum to $7,900. Over the last 50 years, the Biden plan points out, the maximum Pell Grant has shrunk from covering nearly 80 percent of the cost of a four-year college degree to less than 30 percent, forcing students to take on more debt.
The president’s proposal would also allocate $62 billion for evidence-based strategies that strengthen completion and retention rates at community colleges and other institutions that serve large numbers of disadvantaged students. Those strategies could include wraparound services such as child care, mental-health counseling, faculty and peer mentoring, and emergency grants to cover food and other basic needs. The money could also go toward efforts to recruit and retain diverse faculty members, improve transfer agreements between colleges, and strengthen remediation programs.
Sharp declines in community-college enrollments since the pandemic broke out have forced colleges to lay off faculty and staff members, threatening the support structures disadvantaged students need to stay enrolled. Two-year colleges have always operated on thin margins, with less money to spend per student, and their students typically require more scaffolding to succeed.
A ‘Step Forward’
Free community college is already a reality in many parts of the country. According to the advocacy group College Promise, there are now 368 free-college programs, including 31 that are statewide. Most are “last dollar” programs, which means the money kicks in only after all grants and scholarships are applied. Pell Grants alone cover tuition costs for most low-income students, so for them, two years of community-college tuition is already free.
“If the goal is just access, we pretty much have that already,” for low-income students, Pazich said. “But if the goal is access to a bachelor’s degree, free community college is not the way to do that.” Still, she said, “there’s something powerful about the message” of free college. “It’s unambiguous.”
First-dollar approaches, which are more expensive to run, would cover tuition and allow students to use their Pell and other grants for books, food, rent, or other expenses. An outline released early Wednesday by the White House didn’t specify whether Biden was proposing a first- or last-dollar plan.
The plan has been warmly received by many higher-education-policy groups, which nonetheless caution that details will determine how effective it is in reducing inequities. Mamie Voight, interim president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, released a statement saying the Biden administration “rightly highlights the critical need at this moment to make once-in-a-generation investments in today’s students. The way that we structure these investments — from the Pell Grant to free college — will determine if decisions today disrupt longstanding racial and socioeconomic inequities in college access, success, and mobility to build the tomorrow our economy and society need and deserve.”
Martha J. Kanter, executive director of the College Promise campaign and an under secretary of education in the Obama administration, called Biden’s proposal “a momentous step forward” for community colleges and minority-serving institutions and the students who attend them. She said she was optimistic that the movement for free college would finally come to fruition this year, but it would require higher-education leaders to set aside their differences and stop fighting over details of which sectors and which students receive the most money.
4-Year Colleges’ Worries
Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, said she hoped four-year colleges would welcome the proposal instead of feeling territorial. “I’m particularly excited about the $62 billion for retention and completion,” she said, funds that could help more students who start out intending to transfer to four-year colleges actually make it there.
Many four-year colleges do, however, worry students will be siphoned away from their campuses. Barbara Mistick, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, released a statement to The Chronicle saying colleges that serve large numbers of low-income students from their communities are particularly concerned about enrollment declines. “The most important question, though, is not its impact on institutions but its impact on student choice and completion,” she wrote. “We need to be certain that we are not incentivizing students toward institutions that are not their best fit, and best fit is different for each student.”
Laura W. Perna, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania who studies free-college plans, said it’s important that the plan serve not only recent college graduates but also older adults. “A lot of these free-tuition programs target students moving from high school directly to community colleges,” said Perna, who is also a vice provost for faculty. That leaves out older learners who are retooling for a different job or re-entering the work force after raising families.
Because of their open-access mission, community colleges attract students who are more likely to need support to tackle college-level work, and when students are enrolled in lengthy sequences of remedial courses, many get discouraged and drop out. Colleges have been changing their approaches to developmental education to offer “just in time” remediation, corequisite classes, and extra tutoring. The Biden plan would provide extra money that could be used to support improvements in remedial education, as well as $9 billion to train, equip, and diversify teachers so more high-school graduates are ready for college-level work.
A report by the Campaign for Free College Tuition found that free community-college tuition would improve upward mobility by significantly lowering financial barriers to college. According to the analysis, inflation-adjusted tuition costs among the various sectors of higher education soared 209 percent to 320 percent between 1980 and 2020. During that time, the gap nearly doubled between the annual earnings of high-school and college graduates, according to the report, written by Robert Shapiro, a former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton.
Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, called the free-college movement “long overdue,” adding that the association would work with the administration and Congress “to iron out details and make these proposed new investments a reality.”
