Public Flagships Are Offering More Middle-Income Scholarships. What Gives?

The cost of a higher education is weighing ever more heavily on the minds of Americans. Nearly three in five people tell the Pew Research Center that “affordability of a college education” is a “very big” national problem, a jump of about 11 percent from 2016, when just one in two had the same concern.

Selective flagship universities appear to be getting the message. More of them are rolling out financial-aid packages aimed directly at students from middle-income families.

James E. Ryan, president of the University of Virginia, on Friday announced that students from families with an annual income of less than $80,000 will be able to attend tuition-free. Students whose families make less than $30,000 will have room and board covered as well.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently started a program that aims to lessen the debt load for middle-income students, in addition to its already robust program for low-income students.

The University of Texas at Austin this year expanded the income limits for students eligible for financial aid. And the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor started a similar program in 2017.

In announcing these programs, administrators have expressed the need to deliver a more affordable education to a wider swath of students.

But lowering what a student pays may help a university’s bottom line, too, said David W. Strauss, a principal at the Art & Science Group, a higher-education research-and-consulting firm.

Scholarships can be need-based, merit-based or some variety thereof, he said. Middle-income scholarships are seen as a public service, higher educations leaders will say, “but it can also be the case that the practical effect is to aid a family that’s still able to pay for some of the freight.”

In doing so, Strauss said, a university can still bring in the revenue that the award helps to make possible.

Even as they promote their commitment to access, universities are asking themselves how far they can stretch students’ pocketbooks to help cover the cost of their education.

Unwelcome Valley

Middle-income students have long found themselves in an unwelcome valley. Their families make too much money to qualify for programs such as Pell Grants, but they lack the financial resources of their wealthier peers. Federal loans are a tool available to many middle-income students, but those loans produce debt as well as diplomas..

And what students are told they can afford in financial-aid applications may be far removed from the reality of what they want to pay, said Strauss.

“If you’re a family that makes $60,000 and you’re being asked to pay for something that costs $25,000 or $30,000 — that’s tough,” Strauss said.

UNC’s Blue Sky Program, the middle-income scholarship program, builds on the Carolina Covenant, an established program for needy students that began in 2003. It’s meant to offer students whose family incomes are no more than twice the federal poverty level — or about $48,500 for a family of four — a chance to graduate debt-free.

The older program has been good both for enrollment and for letting low-income students know that the university values them, said Stephen M. Farmer, vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions. For every student who benefited from the Carolina Covenant, he said, there are two from middle-income backgrounds also receiving aid. “We didn’t want those students to feel like as though they were a second thought to us,” he said.

Part of the challenge in helping those students, however, is deciding just who is middle class. The bar is obviously different in Mississippi than in New York.

At Chapel Hill, Farmer said, it quickly became clear that the university wouldn’t be able to rely on a hard and fast number. Factors like a family’s assets, number of children in the house, and number of students in college affect an individual student’s need.

What officials had in mind was a scholarship that would benefit, say, the child of two teachers, each making $35,000 to $40,000 a year.

Kelly Rosinger, an assistant professor of education at Pennsylvania State University, said her research shows that such scholarships at elite, private institutions have been effective in increasing enrollment among middle-income students.

As for the current surge in these programs, she said, public flagships might be coming to see as part of their mission doing a better job of serving their states’ students. And these universities tend to pick up on what their peers are doing. “If they’re seeing middle-class students leaving college with debt or not enrolling because it just costs too much or they would have to borrow too much to go,” Rosinger said, “they are not really serving all of their mission anymore.”

Programs that find the most success, she added, are those that students know about and that are easy to take advantage of.

Getting the Word Out

That’s a problem the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor grappled with. Kedra Ishop, vice provost for enrollment management, said that when Mark S. Schlissel became president, in 2014, he was surprised to hear from many people that they thought the Ann Arbor campus was too expensive to attend. But the university had existing programs to help make college affordable, Ishop said.

The Go Blue Guarantee was born in part from an effort to make clear what the university has to offer. Families that make less than $65,000 a year and have less than $50,000 in assets can qualify for free tuition. Families that earn up to $180,000 are eligible for some form of support.

Moreover, students who have been accepted by the university and who meet the requirements for the program automatically get the scholarship.

Another challenge with these scholarships, though, is maintaining their funding. UNC’s new program will be supported in part through a $5-million gift from Erskine Bowles, a former president of the university system. The university will rely on fund raising for $15 million to cover the rest of the cost of the program.

In New Mexico, state support has proven a less reliable way to achieve similar ends. A similar and widely available scholarship funded partially by New Mexico’s state lottery once covered the entire cost of tuition for any in-state students with high enough academic marks, but the program has withered in recent years.

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.

Correction (10/24/2018, 10:14 a.m.): Kelly Rosinger is an assistant professor at Penn State, not an associate professor, as this article originally stated. The article has been updated.