Free Tuition Still Leaves Students With $20,000 To $25,000 A Year In Costs, Brookings Says

More than 870 colleges now advertise free tuition for some students, but a new Brookings Institution analysis finds most of these programs repackage existing financial aid rather than add new money. In a new research brief, economist Phillip Levine concludes that the biggest benefit of free tuition may be marketing: it tells families in plain terms that they won’t pay the sticker price that only 1 in 8 students actually pays.

Levine matched a Washington Post database of free tuition policies against federal IPEDS data and net price calculator results from 200 randomly selected four-year colleges. Of the 2,994 colleges in his analysis, 871 (29%) offer free tuition to some group of students, and those schools enroll about 42% of all students, according to Brookings. The programs range from campus-level offers like Rice University’s expanded $200,000 threshold to statewide programs such as New York’s Excelsior Scholarship.