By Jon Marcus, NPR
Middle-income Americans have borne a disproportionate share of college price increases. For them, the net cost of a degree has risen by from 12 to 22 percent since 2009, depending on their earnings level, compared with about 1 percent for lower-income families, federal data show.
Now a handful of schools — many of them private, nonprofit institutions trying to compete with lower-priced public universities — are beginning to designate financial aid specifically for middle-income families in an attempt to lure them back.
Colby has announced a program that will take effect next fall to attract prospective students in the middle. It will cap the cost of tuition, room and board at $10,000 a year for families who earn up to $100,000, and $15,000 for those with incomes of from $100,000 to $150,000.
That’s compared with the current net price at Colby of up to about $53,000 a year for people in those income brackets, after existing discounts and financial aid.
Some prospective students “are squeezed out of eligibility for need-based financial aid even though they do not have the financial wherewithal to fund higher education without assistance,” says Brad Lindberg, Grinnell’s associate vice president of institutional initiatives and enrollment.
The problem for colleges, he adds, is that families like those “assume they’re not going to be eligible for financial aid, so they just don’t apply. People exclude themselves from the process before the process even starts.”
Greene, at Colby, says that could be among the reasons that only a little more than a third of Americans now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey — down from 57 percent in 2015.
“The value proposition of higher education relative to its cost is a huge question mark in the minds of many people,” he says. “That’s why I think there’s such extraordinary discontent about America’s colleges and universities, because middle-income families are the ones that have been squeezed out of those top places.”
Targeting middle-income families with designated scholarships appears to be working, according to some of the colleges that have been doing it. “We’ve seen a nice bump in applications,” says Karen Kristof, assistant vice president and dean of admission at Colorado College. “We’ve seen a better yield.”
Some advocates warn that colleges shouldn’t forsake their lowest-income applicants in the cause of helping middle-income ones.
“It’s crucial for colleges to still target their limited resources to students with the lowest incomes,” says Diane Cheng, vice president of research and policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
The institute calculates that a typical middle-income family has to spend 35 percent of its annual household income sending a child to college for a year. “That’s a pretty substantial share,” says Cheng. But for the lowest-income Americans, she adds, a year in college consumes the equivalent of nearly one-and-a-half times their annual household income.
“Institutions typically have limited resources for providing financial aid,” Cheng says, “and we want to encourage them to balance their desire to attract students from middle-income families with supporting students from low-income backgrounds.”
Read the full story in NPR.
