This month, Michigan and Massachusetts became the latest states to embrace a broad vision for free community college — a sign of continued growth for a policy that has gone nowhere at the federal level but has gained traction in more than 30 states.
Starting this fall, Michigan is covering up to $4,800 a year of community-college tuition costs for most recent high-school graduates. The new initiative expanded on the state’s Reconnect program, which in 2021 began covering tuition costs for adults ages 25 and older who had no postsecondary credentials.
Massachusetts adopted a similar model for older students last year, and now its program goes even further than Michigan’s, covering tuition costs for any student, regardless of age or income, at any of the state’s 15 community colleges.
One goal of such subsidies is to boost community-college enrollment, which declined dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic. Those numbers have begun to turn around: Enrollment in the fall of 2023 grew 4.4 percent from the fall of 2022, according to the Community College Research Center, which is part of Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Thomas Brock, director of the research center, attributes the uptick mostly to how community colleges have adapted over the last few years by offering more flexibility for students. The free-tuition efforts, Brock said, are providing an additional boost.
Community colleges, he said, still are not quite at the level nationally that they were pre-pandemic, but “things are looking much better now than they were.”
Government-funded free community college has broad support across the political spectrum, though there continues to be some dispute about who should pay for it. According to a survey released this month by New America, a left-leaning Washington, D.C., think tank, two-thirds of respondents said the federal government should use taxpayer dollars to provide tuition-free community college. Meanwhile, 77 percent said states should invest in making community college more affordable.
Free community college may sound great, but it still comes with a lot of questions. Tuition benefits alone don’t help with students’ living costs. Staffing levels at under-resourced two-year institutions may not be adequate to support the additional students wooed by free tuition. And while free-college programs are designed to encourage students to get a degree who wouldn’t have otherwise, they could siphon students away from other institutions, especially private colleges.
But as higher ed struggles to overcome a growing perception that college isn’t worth it, campus leaders and experts say increased access to community colleges — which serve many students who are skeptical of four-year institutions — is a welcome development.
‘A Real Benefit’
The fall semester began a week ago at Michigan’s St. Clair County Community College. Kirk Kramer, the institution’s president, said he’s already seeing positive signs from the state’s expanded free-college efforts.
What’s even more important than a short-term boost in enrollment, Kramer said, is a new attitude about two-year institutions within the local community. The college is a century-old institution nestled within a primarily white, rural town along Michigan’s eastern border with Canada, where 11 percent of the population over the age of 25 has earned a postsecondary credential.
“The increased interest in attending will reverberate for a generation of students, who are just now seeing that [college] is possible and an opportunity,” Kramer said. “The increased conversation about college in the community, the appreciation, and the presence of the college and strengthening that conversation … it’s very rewarding for our college.”
Michigan began its journey with free college amid the Covid-19 pandemic, creating its Futures for Frontliners program, offering free community-college tuition to the state’s frontline workers regardless of educational background. A year later, the Reconnect program for students age 25 and older came to be. Then, last year, the starting age was dropped to 21.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has set a “Sixty by 2030” goal, aiming to increase the percentage of adult residents with a postsecondary degree to 60 percent. When Whitmer announced her plan, in 2019, the share was 45 percent. So far, Michigan has brought it up to 51 percent, though it’s not on track to meet the goal on time, according to the Lumina Foundation.
In Massachusetts, Northern Essex Community College saw a 15-percent enrollment increase last year after the state began offering free tuition for older students, said Lane Glenn, its president. In the 2023-24 academic year, enrollment in Massachusetts’s community-college system grew by 45 percent year over year among those 25 and older without a degree.
“It’s been a real benefit for those students, most of whom probably thought they would never be able to finish a degree,” Glenn said. “I feel like it’s a good time to be a community college, [especially] to be one of the states that is elevating the value of community college this way feels really good.”
Now, with more students eligible for the tuition benefit, Northern Essex’s enrollment is set to increase even more.
Glenn said the influx of students in this fall’s class will largely be filling the long-empty seats left open by a period of steady enrollment declines. “We’ve certainly had the space available, [but] it has required some staffing up,” he said. “I think we’ll be fine this first year. By next year, we may start to feel some growing pains.”
Free community college is, in some ways, a return to the way things were. Public colleges in the United States were nearly free to attend for a long time — until an influx of students in the 1960s made it infeasible. College costs really ballooned after the 2008 recession caused lawmakers to make big cuts to state funding for higher ed, prompting tuition increases to make up the difference.
A decade ago, aiming to reverse that trend, Tennessee became the first state in the country to begin covering community colleges’ tuition and fees for high-school graduates. Lawmakers later expanded the benefit to almost any adult in the state.
Per the Community College Research Center, Tennessee’s free-tuition offer has paid off. “I don’t mean to say it’s all about free community college,” said Brock, the center’s director, “but they have seen gradual improvements over time, particularly in student outcomes and students staying in college, earning degrees, and completing their longer-term academic goals.”
Between 2016 and 2022, the share of adults over 25 in Tennessee who had at least a bachelor’s degree rose 5 percentage points, to 31 percent from 26 percent.
Years ago, the Obama administration wanted to nationalize Tennessee’s model, but amid opposition to so much new government spending, it didn’t happen. More recently, President Biden tried again, announcing a plan early in his presidency that would cover two years of tuition at community colleges. Once again, the idea petered out.
Additional Costs and Challenges
So for now, free community college has become a state issue.
“I think other states are trying their best to counter the rising cost of college, but there’s still a lot of work left for us to do,” said Brian Bridges, the secretary of higher education for the State of New Jersey, at a recent panel event discussing the results of New America’s survey.
Most states have chosen a “last-dollar” model, where government support for free tuition only kicks in once students’ federal aid has been maxed out. That can be a problem for students, said Jonathan Turk, an associate professor of higher education at Saint Louis University.
“We know there are additional costs that students and their families face beyond just tuition and fees, like living expenses, transportation, room and board, or meals — those are all substantial costs,” Turk said.
Michigan and Massachusetts have tried to address that problem by offering stipends of up to $1,200 for books, supplies, and other costs. Some of that aid is limited to students who qualify for Pell Grants.
Massachusetts also has a program called SUCCESS, which helps community colleges invest in mentoring and advising. But there isn’t new money to expand it in this year’s state budget, said Glenn, of Northern Essex Community College.
“Providing access to insufficient education is not a benefit, so we want to be sure that as the population of students grows, the support for them also grows,” Glenn said. “If enrollment grows a lot this year, we are certainly going to need some more support.”
As free community college continues to grow, leaders of some four-year institutions are getting nervous that the programs will divert students away from their campuses. That concern isn’t entirely unfounded, especially for private institutions, noted David Deming, a professor of political economy at Harvard University, in a new analysis of Massachusetts’ efforts.
“In my view, this is a good thing, not because private institutions are per se bad (I teach at one!),” Deming wrote as part of a recent Q&A, “but because the competitors to community colleges are typically large online for-profit schools that charge high tuition and deliver poor value for money.”
Over all, Deming said, the net impact of free community college is positive — because most students who attend two-year institutions aim to transfer to a four-year college later.
Improving transfer and subsequent graduation rates, however, will be another task for campus leaders and state officials. Currently, 31 percent of community-college students transfer to a four-year institution, according to the Community College Research Center, and only half of those students earn a bachelor’s degree within six years.
