Dozens of elite universities have expanded “free college” programs to compete for a dwindling pool of middle-class applicants as tuition hikes add to enrollment declines nationwide.
The University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Texas System last month became the latest campuses to waive tuition and fees for students accepted from families living on less than six figures a year.
The announcements come as falling U.S. birth rates reduce the college-aged population and inflation prices more families out of four-year programs.
“Many college and university leaders recognize families are struggling with college costs and are working to expand these strategies to assist more students in choosing the institution that best meets their educational and career goals and objectives,” said Barbara Mistick, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges & Universities, a network of more than 1,000 private campuses.
According to a tracking page at the college search website Appily, 57 colleges and university systems offer free tuition.
Havard University has pledged that families earning up to $150,000 a year will pay between zero and 10% of their annual income. The public Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system offers a free ride at its 26 campuses to families pulling in up to $80,000 annually.
That amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal student loan savings at highly selective schools. Most charge well over six figures for a four-year bachelor’s degree and reject more than 90% of applicants.
“Elite universities have always offered a subset of students free college to meet financial need, reward achievement, or some combination of the two,” said Jason Lee, a policy researcher at the Rand Corp. “This more recent trend in institution-level announcements is ostensibly about making those financial aid policies simpler and more transparent for prospective students and families.”
Higher education has struggled with decades of enrollment declines fueled by tuition hikes, rising living costs and plunging birth rates. Over the past year, enrollments in community colleges and trade programs have also surged as alternatives to costly four-year programs.
In a report this month, the nonprofit Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projected the headcount of public and private high school graduates will fall by more than half a million — or 13% — from a record 3.9 million in 2025 to less than 3.4 million by 2041, reversing decades of growth.
Citing financial problems, hundreds of tuition-dependent small colleges have closed or merged in recent years.
Others have scrambled to gut low-enrollment humanities programs and reallocate resources to more affordable workforce training programs, hoping to capitalize on the trade school craze.
Gary Stocker, a former university administrator who founded College Viability to evaluate campuses’ financial sustainability, noted that well-endowed state flagship universities account for most “free college” programs.
He said they subsidize them with state funds, transferring expenses from students to “the public at large.”
“It’s hardly altruistic,” Mr. Stocker said. “It is reasonable to predict that the ‘free college’ movement will impact many students in non-urban private colleges that are forced to close.”
’Free college’
For centuries, higher education was a privilege reserved for the elite. Reflecting that mindset, U.S. private colleges and public universities did not charge tuition until the 1960s.
Tuition became widespread in the 1970s as more high school graduates applied for college with the hope of gaining economic mobility. Increased demand sparked decades of campus expansions and tuition hikes.
“For most of this nation’s history, college was basically free,” said Timothy Cain, a higher education professor at the public University of Georgia. “The biggest cost was not tuition, but the opportunity cost of giving up a few years of employment to pursue a degree.”
As tuition costs soared, the free college movement expanded from local community programs into statewide efforts in Oregon, Tennessee, Michigan and Massachusetts.
In 2013, advocates founded the Campaign for Free College Tuition to lobby for subsidizing higher education nationwide.
Over the past several years, the public University of Tennessee at Knoxville, private Carnegie Mellon University, public University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and public University of Massachusetts system made their free college programs income-dependent.
On Nov. 20, UPenn and Brandeis expanded free tuition to include all families earning less than $200,000 a year.
Carnegie Mellon, MIT and the University of Texas system did the same the next day.
Other schools raising their free tuition income thresholds in 2024 included Colby College, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Richmond, Vanderbilt, Virginia and North Carolina.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at UPenn, said the programs benefit “only a very small fraction of college students” nationwide.
“The vast majority go to community colleges and regional state universities, where they juggle their schoolwork with multiple jobs, child-care duties, and more,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “Any lasting solution to our higher education problems will have to address their needs.”
’Operational challenges’
In October, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center estimated that first-year college enrollment plunged by 6% from 2023 to 2024 for 18-year-old freshmen entering right after high school graduation.
Kelly Vaughn, interim dean of the education school at private Notre Dame de Namur University in California, said colleges must become “flexible, accessible and affordable” to survive.
“Declining enrollment leads to declining finances and operational challenges,” Ms. Vaughn said. “Collectively, we need to be more creative and mindful of where the trend is going.”
In Massachusetts, MIT has pledged to cover tuition, housing, dining, fees and “an allowance for books and personal expenses” for the 50% of households estimated to have annual incomes below $100,000.
According to the Education Data Initiative, MIT charged $57,986 for tuition in 2022-2023, well above the $39,400 average for four-year private universities.
With an endowment estimated at $24.6 billion this year, MIT has long been able to provide need-based discounts because it does not depend on tuition dollars to stay open. The trick has always been getting into the highly selective university, which only accepts about 4% of applicants each year.
Graduates earn an average starting salary of $126,438 a year as they enter various technological industries, according to MIT’s most recent survey of departing seniors.
Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at private Boston University, said free tuition bolsters the narrative that elite schools like MIT “serve a broad public interest and are not just a club for the children of wealthy and privileged families.”
“Institutions of higher education are waking up to the reality that young people have more and more good options besides a four-year degree,” Mr. Wood said.
