Of the nearly 10,000 students enrolled at Brookdale Community College in central New Jersey, about 17 percent are still in high school.

Some of them travel to the campus during the school day to take courses in introductory English, history, psychology and sociology. Others stay right at their own secondary schools and learn from high school teachers who deliver college-course lessons.

They’re part of a practice, increasingly popular nationwide, that sees teenagers complete advanced classes — mostly offered through community colleges — while juggling typical high school activities like sports practices, part-time jobs and dances.

“One of the reasons why we put a lot of time and effort into the high school programs, to get students started on the college pathway in high school, is it’s going to save them a lot of money, save them a lot of time and hopefully get them to their career goals sooner,” says Sarah McElroy, dean of pathways and partnerships at Brookdale Community College.

Called dual enrollment, the phenomenon grew for the third year in a row this year. And the growth is steep — up 10 percent compared to last year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That’s significant in an era when college leaders are concerned about attracting and retaining students who may be skeptical about the value of a degree and also worried about the impending “enrollment cliff” resulting from fewer Americans of traditional college age coming up in the next few years.

It’s going to save them a lot of money, save them a lot of time and hopefully get them to their career goals sooner.

— Sarah McElroy

Nationally, about a fifth of students who take community college courses these days are still in high school, according to John Fink, a senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center. In some parts of the country, the share is even higher — it’s almost 40 percent in Iowa and Indiana, for example.

Among people who started ninth grade in 2009, about a third took some type of dual enrollment course, Fink says, adding, “That’s a big penetration into the high school market.”

The trend is catching on with policymakers and educators as they look for ways to spur college-going while also ameliorating high tuition prices.

“People are concerned about the costs of higher education: state legislators and governors, families and students,” says Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute. “The idea of getting college credit while you’re in high school is appealing as a way of holding the cost of college down.”

Brookdale Community College is in a state that has named dual enrollment as a priority. By 2028, New Jersey aims to double the number of high school students enrolled in at least one dual enrollment course, ensure all high schools provide dual enrollment options, and close access gaps to these programs for different groups of students.

That push is evident at Brookdale. From 2018 to 2023, the college recorded a 39 percent increase in Monmouth County high school students enrolling in its college-level courses. The institution hopes to increase enrollment among high school students by 50 percent more by 2028.

“We are trying to reach every high schooler in some way,” McElroy says.

Yet Brookdale, other community colleges, and their K-12 school partners face a few challenges in order for dual enrollment to “live up to its potential as a lever of access and equity to college and careers,” Fink says.

Good for Everyone?

Dual enrollment takes many forms and goes by many names. Some programs are run through well-organized early-college high schools that help students earn a full associate degree by the time they graduate. Others are more free-form, allowing students to take one or two courses as they please — a style some observers have critiqued as “random acts of dual enrollment.” Brookdale offers several different models through its high school partnerships.

Across these varied formats, dual enrollment seems to have become popular because it’s beneficial for all parties involved, according to education experts.

It’s good for students, Fink says, citing two decades of research that shows it leads to better high school and college completion rates. It’s good for community colleges, which advance their missions to serve their surrounding area — and also possibly create “a larger pool of students coming back to you” for additional classes after high school, too, he adds.

In fact, dual enrollment is “the most consistent source of enrollment growth for community colleges over the past decade,” says Nick Mathern, director of K-12 partnerships for Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit that supports a network of community colleges. “Depending on how you break down the age cohort, there is a way in which you see it’s the only source of enrollment growth for community colleges over the last decade.”

Especially in states that provide extra public funds to support dual enrollment, it’s good for school districts and public schools, proponents argue, since they can use those programs as a selling point for attracting families and students who might otherwise look to private schools, or public schools elsewhere.

These dual-enrollment programs are not replacing Advanced Placement courses, which have been a mainstay at high schools for decades and remain popular, Wyner says. Among the three-quarters of high schools that offer advanced coursework, about 78 percent offer dual enrollment compared to 76 percent that offer AP classes. But one advantage dual enrollment may have over the AP program is that it offers a much wider catalog of options, including some career and technical courses, which may appeal to a broader set of students.

“For a lot of students who are not eager to take more purely academic courses — or about test-taking and writing papers — this is an enormous opportunity to get excited about higher education through fields of study not offered in high schools,” Wyner says.

Some of the high schools that feed into Brookdale offer dual enrollment, AP courses and the advanced International Baccalaureate curriculum all at once, McElroy says: “We are finding students are taking a menu of options.”

One bonus she sees regarding the dual enrollment courses: Students know they’ll earn college credit for taking them, whereas they’ll only get college credit for AP classes if they score high enough on standardized exams.

“It transfers so widely. Four-year colleges are taking those credits,” McElroy says. “That’s helped to elevate dual enrollment across the state.”

Addressing Inequality

Yet data on dual enrollment reveals that not all student groups participate at the same rate.

Racial minorities, men and students who would be the first in their families to go to college are underrepresented in these programs. In the county that feeds into Brookdale Community College, for example, “our Black and Hispanic students are not finishing at the same rate white students are,” McElroy says.

Comparing the percent of high school dual enrollment students by race and ethnicity statewide (orange) and at Brookdale (blue.) Data courtesy of Brookdale Community College.

There are a few factors that contribute to this inequality, Fink says. For instance, some schools use standardized test scores to determine which students are eligible to participate, creating barriers since some groups of students consistently score lower than others. Many dual enrollment courses are taught by high school teachers who have the credentials needed to instruct at the community college level — typically a master’s degree in a relevant discipline — and at some high schools, there is a shortage of qualified teachers. And while some states have arrangements that make dual enrollment courses free for students, in other regions, families have to pay.

“If you have to pay extra to take college courses in high school, you’re going to get wealthier, whiter families taking advantage,” Fink says.

Then there is an older mindset to contend with, one that views dual enrollment primarily as an option for academically advanced students who are looking for enrichment.

It is true that some students choose dual enrollment through Brookdale to improve their chances of being accepted into a selective four-year university, McElroy says.

“We know from the research that dual enrollment courses are more rigorous than the standard- issue high school course,” Wyner says. “And so for a lot of parents and students who are eager to be challenged, they see dual enrollment as an opportunity to get exposure to college-level work and get challenged in their coursework.”

But some educators and researchers hope dual enrollment can serve as an opportunity to broaden access to higher education for “students on the margins of going to college,” Fink says, by boosting their confidence, by introducing them to topics they won’t learn about in high school that might inspire them to consider going to college, and by creating momentum for possible postsecondary studies.

“I don’t begrudge middle-class students and college-bound students the opportunity to take classes in high school,” Mathern says. “But if we are not intentional about how we deploy these programs, we are not actually changing how many students in any given community earn a college credential.”

To that end, Brookdale offers college readiness courses to its high school students who participate in dual enrollment programs, designed to teach them skills they need to succeed in advanced classes.

It’s unethical to really not provide the supports and advising. ... Unless you’re doing all of those things, it can be harmful and have the opposite of the intended effect.

— John Fink

“It shows students they can do it,” McElroy says. “College could be for them.”

For more high school students to succeed in dual enrollment, experts stress that schools and colleges have to specifically look out for them and guide them through the process.

“We think colleges should be establishing a shared vision with their local school districts about what they want to achieve for dual enrollment,” Mathern says. “As we open the door wider, we can’t just give more students access to college classes and call it good.”

After all, if a student tries a dual enrollment class and doesn’t succeed in it, the experience can leave them worse off than if they hadn’t attempted it all, either by wasting their tuition dollars, leaving them with a low grade that will follow them on a transcript or by discouraging them from pursuing more higher education.

“It’s unethical to really not provide the supports and advising,” Fink says. “Unless you’re doing all of those things, it can be harmful and have the opposite of the intended effect.”

To that end, Brookdale has a dedicated team of support staff for its dual enrollment programs, McElroy says, explaining, “We want to serve the students as much as possible.”

Despite the flaws that remain in many dual enrollment programs, Fink is optimistic that, with fine-tuning, they can serve as a promising pathway to better college and career-training options for more young people.

“There are a lot of reasons we would want to do things differently in the college-to-career transition. It’s largely producing poor and inequitable outcomes,” he says. “What do we do with senior year of high school? Students are checked out. By bringing more career and postsecondary training into high school, you’re blurring the line, and that’s a positive thing for students.”

© Photo courtesy of Brookdale Community College.

The premise of “free college” programs popping up around the country in recent years is that bringing the price of higher education down to nearly nothing will spur more students to enroll and earn degrees.

But is that what actually happens?

David Monaghan, an associate professor of sociology at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, has been digging into that question in a series of recent research studies. And the results indicate that not all of these free college programs have the intended effect — and that how a program is set up can make a big difference.

In a working paper the professor co-authored that was released last month, for instance, Monaghan compared two free college programs in Pennsylvania to dig into their outcomes.

One of the programs is the Morgan Success Scholarship at Lehigh Carbon Community College, which is available to students at Tamaqua Area High School who enroll right after completing their high school degree. Qualifying students are guaranteed fully paid tuition, with the program paying any gap left after the student applies for other financial aid and scholarships (a model known as a “last dollar, tuition-only guarantee.”)

The other is the Community College of Philadelphia’s 50th Anniversary Scholars Program, which is available to students who graduate from a high school in Philadelphia and meet other merit criteria. It is also a “last dollar” program that covers any tuition and fees not paid from other sources. The students must enroll immediately after high school graduation, have a low enough income to qualify for a federal Pell scholarship, file their application for federal financial aid by a set date and enroll in at least six credits at the college.

The Morgan Success Scholarship seemed to work largely as its designers hoped. The year after the program started, the rate of college-going at Tamaqua Area High School jumped from 86 percent to 94 percent, and college-going increased another percentage point the following year. And the number of students graduating from Lehigh Carbon Community College with a two-year degree increased after the program was created.

But something else happened that wasn’t by design. The free-college program appears to have led some students who would have enrolled in a four-year college to instead start at the two-year college — where they may or may not end up going on to a four-year institution. There is a chance, then, that the program may end up keeping some students from finishing a four-year degree. “On balance, the program expands access to postsecondary education more than it diverts students away from four-year degrees, though it does appear to do this as well,” the paper asserts.

The free-college program at Community College of Philadelphia, meanwhile, didn’t seem to move the needle much at all.

“I expected to see an enrollment boost, and I didn’t even see that,” says Monaghan.

In other words, it isn’t even clear from the data that the free college effort sparked any increase in enrollment at the college.

The reason, he says, may be that the leaders of the program did not do enough to spread awareness about the option, and about what it takes to apply. Since the program was open to all high schools in the city, doing that communication was more difficult than in the case of the other program they studied.

“Our analyses suggest that a tuition guarantee, by itself, will not necessarily have any impact,” he and his co-author wrote in their paper. “If a program falls in the forest and no one hears it, it will not shift enrollment patterns.”

Monaghan says that the findings show that more attention should be paid to the details of how free college programs work — especially since many of them are full of restrictions and require students to jump through a series of hoops to take advantage of them. That can be a lot to ask a 17- or 18-year-old finishing high school to navigate.

“We really overestimate what people are like at the end of high school,” and how savvy they’ll be about weighing the costs and benefits of higher education, he argues. “There hasn’t been enough research on free college programs in terms of how they are implemented and communicated,” he adds.

It’s worth noting, of course, that some free college programs do significantly increase enrollment. And that can create another unintended side effect: straining resources at two-year colleges.

That was the case in Massachusetts, where the MassReconnect program that launched in 2023 led more than 5,000 new students to enroll the first semester it was available, according to a report from the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.

As a result, the state’s 15 community colleges have struggled to hire enough staff — including adjunct instructors — to keep up with the new demand.

What did that program do to spark so much interest? Unlike the programs studied in Pennsylvania, MassReconnect is available to not just people freshly graduating high school, but to anyone over 25 years old — a much larger pool of possible takers.

Another working paper by Monaghan, which looked at as much available research as he could find on free college programs, found a large variety of impact.

And that may be the biggest lesson: For free college programs, the devil really is in the details of how they are set up and communicated.

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This story was originally published by The Daily Yonder.

Chris Nelson teaches preschool in rural Vermont, just a few miles from the Canadian border, but not in the school or child care center most people think of when they imagine state or locally funded pre-K. Instead, her 3- and 4-year-old students are integrated into her five-star-rated home-based child care program, where she also cares for younger children and a few kids who come after school until their working parents pick them up.

Many of those parents would have to drive more than an hour to reach a center- or school-based pre-K program where the state covers tuition for just 10 hours a week. In contrast, Nelson’s program is open 12 hours a day to cover parents’ commutes, the nontraditional hours of shift workers and those who do seasonal work.

Nelson would like to continue teaching pre-K, and parents of those children would like to receive the state’s $3,800 free tuition for enrolling in Nelson’s program. However, new recommendations from Vermont’s School Board Insurance Trust (VSBIT), which insures schools and preschool programs, effectively exclude home-based providers from participation, because the $2 million insurance policy they recommend (based on school district needs) isn’t even available to home-based child care providers, sometimes also called family child care providers or FCCs. Nelson brought the problem to the attention of state child care regulators. In a memo released in mid-June to school district superintendents, Vermont Agencies of Education and Human Services indicate that local departments of education can waive the insurance requirement for home-based pre-K programs that are unable or cannot afford to secure the policy recommended by VSBIT. Because this policy change has come so late, just two months before the 2024 school year begins, when most districts have already made decisions about partnerships with private pre-K providers, it remains to be seen how many home-based child care providers will be able to offer pre-K this year.

Vermont, like many states, is committed to a mixed-delivery model for pre-K education, allowing the state’s pre-K tuition subsidy to be applied for programs in a variety of existing settings, including those based in homes. Nevertheless, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) State of Preschool 2023 Yearbook, in 2022-2023, more than 60 percent of pre-K children served were in public school settings, not private programs or home-based child care options. Together, all of those programs served just 44 percent of eligible 4-year-olds and 17 percent of 3-year-olds. More than half of all 3- and 4-year-old children still do not attend preschool. For many rural families especially, the barriers of paying for and getting their children to a pre-K program are just too great.

Creating “universal” access to high-quality pre-K will require a massive, long-term public investment (as much as $33 billion, according to NIEER). In the near term, states can increase access by leveraging the existing infrastructure for providing pre-K in the home-based programs that already serve many rural families. Policy experts like The Erikson Institute and NIEER recommend “meaningfully” including and supporting home-based child care providers in the expansion and implementation of publicly funded pre-K as a promising first step to increasing access, especially in states where more than 50 percent of the population lives in a child care desert. A new initiative led by Home Grown, a national funder collaborative focused on improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, in partnership with NIEER, would support state, city, county and tribal government leaders to include home-based child care in their pre-K programs.

States’ commitment to a mixed-delivery model often falters in part because many, like Vermont, have a governance structure that reinforces a tendency to see pre-K as just an additional grade before kindergarten, with regulations and funding that follow the template of elementary education. These include layers of requirements for teacher licensure, classroom environments and administrative oversight. Meanwhile, home-based child care is overseen by the department of social services, with different parameters for licensure and oversight. Former state Rep. Ashton Clemmons, who co-chaired the early childhood caucus in North Carolina’s General Assembly, notes that this “disalignment” works to segregate infant-toddler caregivers from those who teach pre-K.

“If you give parents a voucher and let them go where they want to, many parents would choose FCCs for pre-K as well as care for their infants and toddlers,” says Rachel Bymun, a licensed home-based child care provider in Bay Point, California, a low-income, primarily immigrant community an hour from San Francisco. She notes that although California also subscribes to a mixed-delivery model, her county does not have the Family Child Care Home Education Network that would enable home-based child care providers like her to participate in California’s subsidized pre-K program. As a result, families in her county who wish to access publicly funded pre-K have to leave her program and enroll in another setting.

The families who prefer a home-based child care environment often are the most underserved and hard to reach, including families of color, those in rural communities, those who speak languages other than English, and those who work nontraditional hours, according to Alexandra Patterson, director of policy and strategy at Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders supporting home-based child care: “Excluding these providers from the formal pre-K system further marginalizes the families and providers who most need those resources.”

Another significant barrier to access is that working parents need more than two to six hours of care per day for 180 days a year, which is the typical pre-K school year. Many eligible working parents struggle to get multiple children of different ages to different schools or can’t find a preschool with an open slot that is also within commuting distance from their work and home. Home-based pre-K, on the other hand, is typically integrated into a comprehensive child care program serving multiple children of mixed ages that is open all day and year-round. This family-like setting, according to this report from The Erikson Institute, provides continuity and stability for children, culturally and linguistically responsive care, individualized education, and fosters the community connections and relationships that families rely on for support from each other and their child’s teacher.

Nelson’s nature-based, play-based approach to learning in a small, mixed-age group is a strength of home-based pre-K that many parents prefer to hectic classrooms full of 20 or 30 4-year-olds.

“Schools mandate 275 days a year for learning,” she says, “but I believe every single minute is a teachable moment. On a typical day, we might visit the pond to collect tadpoles and bring them back so that children can learn about life cycles. The two-year-olds might want to feel the little jelly eggs, and the older ones will see that the eggs grow legs and tails and grow into frogs.”

This approach is also endorsed by the National Academies New Vision for High Quality Preschool Curriculum. The “Magic 8” preschool classroom practices, according to child development researchers, include precisely the practices FCCs implement daily in their homes: lots of listening to children, holistic sequential activities, cooperative interactions between kids, and minimal time spent in transition from one space to another or between lessons. These videos from Home Grown feature home-based child care providers demonstrating these practices as they teach and care for mixed-age groups of children.

How could publicly funded pre-K programs enroll more children and accommodate the needs of more families? NIEER’s recent report and recommendations from the Erikson Institute on pay equity and support for providers detail strategies for setting pre-K reimbursement rates to reflect the true cost of providing high-quality pre-K services in a home-based child care setting. These include supporting home-based providers with educational, coaching and evaluation programs specific to preschool standards, setting environmental recommendations and the ratio of infants to toddlers allowed under a caregiver’s license appropriately for home-based settings. Changes like these would allow Nelson and other home-based child care providers to sustain their programs and open their doors to 3- and 4-year-olds who are waiting in the wings for school to start. This solution also builds on and strengthens the existing capacity of FCC educators, buttressing states’ workforces and economies in both the short and long terms.

What’s more, this solution doesn’t require building new preschool wings onto aging school buildings or training up a new cadre of preschool teachers. What it does require, says Patterson, is an “innovative and inclusive view of family child care homes as centers of learning, and of qualified caregivers who operate them as early childhood educators,” that is, pre-K teachers deserving of all the same support and salary afforded to school- or center-based pre-K programs.

© noBorders - Brayden Howie / Shutterstock

Last week, 2U, a pioneer of the so-called Online Program Management (OPM) model for helping colleges run online degree programs, announced that it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with a “prepackaged” deal arising from prior negotiation with creditors.

The company was an edtech “unicorn” at its height — worth billions — and characterized as a “giant” in the space.

But after a rocky few years, a bankruptcy filing wasn’t all that surprising.

Nevertheless, it raises the question: Was that announcement a rebuke of the entire OPM model — or just the story of one troubled company?

The answer may have consequences for the future of online higher ed, since OPMs were once viewed both as a winning strategy for universities to make money by increasing enrollments and as a pathway to expand access to advanced learning for students who wouldn’t or couldn’t participate on campus.

A Giant Falls

In the early days of 2U, the company worked with selective institutions with elite reputations to create online graduate programs that charged high tuition rates. In exchange, 2U took a large share of tuition revenue. Then the company shifted to offering universities “stackable” options instead of its full package of services, ostensibly to help lower tuition.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s forced experiment in emergency remote instruction prompted more colleges to seek support from outside companies like 2U to create more-permanent online learning options, argued Robert Ubell, vice dean emeritus of online learning at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, in 2021 in a column for EdSurge. Yet he suggested that OPMs were “merely a stopgap therapy” for “colleges with insufficient digital infrastructure,” recommending that institutions seek more sustainable ways to grow their online programs.

In 2021, 2U bought edX, the massive-online open course platform started by MIT and Harvard, for $800 million. Since then, 2U’s trajectory has been called a “long, steep fall,” with declining enrollments, increasing debt and other factors like pressure from regulators. In 2023, 2U lost one of its biggest and most prominent clients when it stopped running the University of Southern California’s online programs.

OPMs have come under scrutiny in recent years, particularly for tuition-sharing contracts that critics say encourage predatory marketing practices and swell student loan debt. A 2019 report from the Century Foundation, called “Dear Colleges: Take Control of Your Online Courses,” urged institutions to turn away from outsourced programs. New regulations were expected for the industry, but they have been delayed. In the middle of July, the U.S. Department of Education proposed regulations to increase oversight over distance education programs, including requiring additional reporting to better enable the government to monitor student outcomes.

According to 2U, the Chapter 11 process started by its recent filing won’t disrupt operations. The deal will eliminate half of 2U’s debt, give the company more time to pay back loans and provide an additional $110 million in financing, according to terms. In a release, 2U said it expects the process to last only a couple of months.

Some observers have suggested that 2U’s filing was squarely the result of an overstretched company.

Edtech commentator Phil Hill argues that the filing was a predictable result of the company’s balance sheet. He also argues that the pre-packaged deal defused the “debt bomb” that 2U held, giving them a chance to bounce back.

But other experts suggest that colleges are increasingly turning to alternative models, such as “anti-OPMs,” for their online programs. In theory, these models allow colleges to outsource building online programs while ultimately working to run the programs themselves, thereby helping universities become “self-sufficient.”

The idea that online programs run by external vendors serve as “cash cows” for universities hasn’t worked, argued Emily Ravenwood, manager of academic technology consultants at the University of Michigan, in 2021 in an essay for EdSurge. And she also called the approach “pedagogically bankrupt,” writing:

“Once we stop allowing higher enrollment to be the driving force behind online programs, what do we let drive development? I would argue that we need to start with our institutional missions and goals. Who are the communities we serve and draw our students from? What do they need in order to fully partake of our offerings? What can technology add to our school’s mission? If we start with these questions, a very different and far more diversified approach to online learning may emerge. We’ve already seen some first steps in this direction, from a few schools; let us continue that way.”

Since 2U works with some 260 colleges and universities, its ultimate fate will likely play a big role in the future of the OPM model.

© beast01 / Shutterstock

It’s no secret that high school students are looking at the prospect of college more skeptically, and a large part of their hesitation comes from worry about taking on thousands of dollars in student loans.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

It’s only natural that they would experience sticker shock after researching the annual cost of attendance at universities that have caught their eye — which might be equivalent to a parent’s annual salary.

But should students count on having to scrape together that full amount?

Not likely, based on EdSurge’s number crunching.

Students generally don’t pay the full cost of attendance at public universities, according to federal data from College Scorecard. While the data only tracks students who receive federal financial aid — be it grants or loans — it shows that students typically get some level of discount even at the priciest public institutions and regardless of income level.

Across 1,800 public colleges and universities, the average full-price cost of attendance clocked in about $17,300 per year. Factoring in students’ grants and scholarships, it fell to a net average cost $10,200.

Yet seeing the gross cost of attendance can be intimidating for college-minded high schoolers and their families, particularly for those who are low-income or who aspire to be the first in their families to graduate with an advanced degree.

Before dismissing a college or university based on sticker price, students should use an institution’s net price calculator to see what they might be paying after financial aid, says Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

“Like with all things in postsecondary education, there's no one size fits all. Some schools would have lots of students that don't pay full price, and some schools would have most that do,” she explains. But the full cost of attendance is “not what most students pay. So don't be turned off by the sticker price. Odds are good that what you'll pay will be discounted to some degree.”

How Family Income Affects Tuition Prices

There were extremes on either side of the net price spectrum, with a handful of colleges reporting that students got money back on average thanks to receiving financial aid, while at others, students saw little difference between the pre- and post-financial aid price tags.

The University of California, Berkeley, is one of the country’s most expensive public universities, with an annual average cost of attendance slightly more than $41,000, according to federal data. That includes tuition, fees, books, other supplies and living expenses.

After grants and scholarships are applied, however, that figure falls to an average net price of about $17,400. Students in the lowest income bracket — with a family income of $30,000 or less — are left with an average net price of $9,200. While not exactly cheap, it’s roughly one-fifth of the original price tag. Students in the data’s highest financial bracket — with a family income of more than $110,000 — saw an average net price of $36,200.

This tracks with an analysis for the Brookings Institution, which found that family income is a better indicator than the full sticker price of what a student can expect to pay for tuition. Nonresident senior fellow Phillip Levine found that, between the 1995 and 2019 academic years, the share of college students who pay the full cost of attendance fell from 53 percent to 26 percent for those enrolled in state at public colleges. It fell from 29 percent to 16 percent for those enrolled at private, nonprofit colleges.

“The typical net price increases with income,” he states in the report. “Every additional dollar of income translates to around a 16-cent increase in net price.”

The net cost of a higher education has gone up for students at all income levels, he writes.

Given all of the variables that go into calculating how much need-based financial aid a student will get — not just how much parents earn, but factors like family size and the cost of the university — Desjean says price can be a barrier to students of any income level. However, lower-income families are typically looking at tougher choices when it comes to covering college expenses.

“I think low-income students are maybe disproportionately impacted, even with financial aid, just with having less discretionary income,” Desjean says. “A higher-income family might say, ‘We can't take a vacation this year.’ Whereas a low-income family may never take a vacation, so the things they’d be looking at giving up would be cutting their already tight grocery budget.”

First-generation or low-income students may also be less aware of financial aid that’s available to them, she says, while other students may have people in their lives who can give advice on and encourage them to explore all the aid options available.

Even families with similar incomes can have widely different expenses making demands on their budgets, Desjean adds, or have different mindsets about whether they can cut back to pay for college.

Organizations like the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators

are trying to dispel myths about financial aid, namely that it’s too difficult to apply for or that students shouldn’t apply if they assume they’re ineligible.

The U.S. Department of Education did itself no favors when its chaotic rollout of the new FAFSA system during the 2023-2024 school year hit technical snags that caused some students to miss out on money.

That’s a shame, Desjean says, because the new system did deliver on its promise to make applying for federal aid faster and easier — if students could use it.

“This year should have been the year we could really celebrate those changes and say, ‘Look, everyone, it's easy to apply for financial aid. Go ahead and do it,’” she says. “Unfortunately it kept with the old narrative, or it may have even amplified the old narrative. So I think the work we all need to be doing in the college access space is trying to remind students, ‘This year was not great, but there have been improvements to the FAFSA. Next year is going to be even better. Don't be intimidated.’”

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