One new report recommends that the first two years of public universities and colleges be free nationwide, and a nonprofit called Redeeming America’s Promise goes even further with a proposal to give every lower- and middle-class student a scholarship to cover the full cost of college.
“The rising millennial generation has been so deeply affected by student debt that they’re driving a conversation about this challenge,” said Morley Winograd, president of Redeeming America’s Promise, who said “well-meaning but what I would call Band-Aid solutions” aren’t enough to fix the problem.
The group led by Winograd, who was an advisor to former Vice President Al Gore and now is a senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, proposes redirecting existing federal and state financial aid and tuition tax breaks to give full tuition scholarships in specified amounts—$2,500 per academic year for community college and $8,500 for four-year universities—to every student from a family earning $180,000 a year or less.
That would come in just under the current average advertised full cost of public college and university tuitions, as calculated by the College Board.
The scholarships would be limited to two years for an associate’s degree and four years for a bachelor’s degree, encouraging students to graduate on time, which only a fifth of them do today at four-year institutions and 4 percent at two-year schools. Colleges and universities generally wouldn’t be allowed to raise their prices higher than the scholarship amounts, forcing them to control their costs.
Under the plan, which is backed by several Republican and Democratic former governors, Cabinet members, and congressmen, the students could take out loans to cover their living expenses, and repay them based on their incomes after graduation.
It’s an approach that’s also being pushed by University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist and higher-education policy expert Sara Goldrick-Rab and a colleague, Nancy Kendall, who urge in a new report that the billions of dollars in existing federal financial aid and some state money be redirected to make tuition, fees, books, and supplies free for the first two years of any two- or four-year public university or college and that students be given stipends and jobs to help them pay their living expenses.
Goldrick-Rab and Kendall call this the free two-year college option, or F2CO.
(Next page: It’s not all rainbows)
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