Introduction
After a post-pandemic decline, inflation-adjusted college sticker prices are once again rising, with some colleges now advertising annual costs exceeding $100,000. These figures receive considerable public attention, reinforcing the widespread perception that college is unaffordable. Yet the advertised price is often very different from what students actually pay because it does not account for financial aid. However, the complexity of the financial aid system can make it difficult for colleges to effectively communicate that reality.
Free tuition policies are one increasingly common strategy designed to overcome that communication problem. These programs typically eliminate tuition charges for students with incomes below specified income thresholds. In recent years, institutions across the country have announced such programs with considerable publicity, and the Washington Post now identifies more than 900 colleges and universities offering free tuition to some set of students.
At first glance, free tuition policies appear to represent a major expansion of financial aid that will make college more affordable for eligible students. However, free tuition may not provide as much assistance as it seems for two reasons.
First, tuition is not the only cost of going to college; students also have to pay for housing, food, books, supplies, travel, and other personal expenses. For some families, covering those costs will still be difficult even without a tuition bill.
Second, many lower-income students would have received enough financial aid to cover tuition even before the “free tuition” policy existed. In some cases, students were receiving enough financial aid to cover some of those other expenses in addition to tuition, especially at well-resourced institutions. Often, the financial aid package included enough grant-based financial aid (which does not need to be repaid) to cover tuition even if it was not labeled as “free tuition.” That is, for many students, free tuition policies may function less as new aid than as a repackaging of existing aid into a more salient form. While free tuition may not correspond to additional aid, these policies can help communicate to eligible students that they will not need to pay the full sticker price.
This research brief uses the Washington Post database of free tuition policies and other sources to describe which colleges are using these policies and how they affect the prices students ultimately pay. I document how common these policies have become, how income thresholds vary across institutions that have income-based free tuition policies and the extent to which those policies reduce college costs beyond existing financial aid.
The evidence suggests that these policies are widespread across public colleges and highly endowed private universities. They are less common among private institutions with smaller endowments that rely heavily on tuition revenue to pay their bills (“tuition dependent”). The analysis also suggests that free tuition policies do not coincide with a large expansion of grant aid but instead mostly represent a relabeling of existing aid. Their main benefit may be communicating affordability in a way that is easier for prospective students and their families to understand, a worthy goal.
Free tuition policies come in different forms
The Washington Post database includes a range of free tuition policies with details that differ across institutions. Most have income thresholds for eligibility. Some include academic requirements that students must also satisfy.
At private colleges and universities, free tuition policies are set by individual institutions, and eligibility generally is based only on income thresholds.1 For example, Emory’s Advantage Plus policy offers free tuition to admitted students with incomes below $200,000. Some private institutions go further and cover virtually the full cost of attendance (including most non-tuition expenses) for students with incomes below a lower threshold. For example, the Rice Investment offers free tuition to admitted students with incomes below $200,000 and free tuition, housing and food to admitted students with incomes below $100,000. The most highly endowed of these colleges have very generous policies: Princeton University covers the full cost of attendance for families with incomes below $150,000 and offers free tuition to those with incomes under $250,000.2
For public institutions, free tuition policies may be implemented at the statewide level (like the New York Excelsior Scholarship), within a state university system (like University of Minnesota Promise Plus for all university-level campuses) or at a particular campus, such as a flagship university (like University of Virginia’s AccessUVA program). Many policies include academic requirements (like Indiana’s 21st Century Scholarship program).3 Others have examined the specifics of these “Promise” programs in more detail.
Some programs offer free tuition without explicit income or academic thresholds but instead rely on other eligibility criteria, like residency requirements. Such programs are especially common at community colleges, where tuition levels are lower and students tend to come from lower-income families (MassEducate).4
Many colleges offer free tuition programs
Free tuition has become quite common at different types of colleges and universities. To document this, I rely on the full Washington Post database of institutions that have such policies. Those policies vary in their academic requirements, income thresholds, and other factors. Initially, I ignore these distinctions, and I consider an institution to have a “free tuition” policy if they advertise free tuition for some group of students.
I categorize colleges as in my earlier work on college pricing. Private 4-year institutions are distinguished by endowment size per student (very large: greater than $500,000, large: between $100,000 and $500,000; and tuition-dependent: less than $100,000). Public 4-year institutions are distinguished by their flagship/very high research activity (“R1”) status versus others. In this analysis, I also include community colleges as a separate category.5
Overall, 2,994 colleges are included in the analysis, of which 871 offer free tuition, 29% of the total.6 About 42% of students are enrolled in colleges that have a free tuition policy (though not all students would qualify), indicating that institutions with these policies are larger, on average, than those without such policies.
Figure 1 shows that, for the three categories of public colleges, between about 40% and 65% have a free tuition policy; public flagship/R1 institutions are at the high end of that range.
Only 7% of tuition-dependent (low endowment) private institutions offer free tuition, compared to 18% and 33% of those with large and very large endowments, respectively. The gaps are even larger when weighting by enrollment. Within the private 4-Year Very Large Endowment category, free tuition policies are more common at institutions with larger enrollments: 33% of institutions in that category offer free tuition for those with incomes below some stated threshold, but more than three-quarters of students in that category are enrolled in such schools.
Tuition is only part of the cost of college
Even if they are eligible for free tuition, students face substantial expenses to attend college. These costs include food and housing, books, travel and personal items. This analysis focuses on “traditional” college students—recent high school graduates who attend college and live away from their parents. For those students, non-tuition costs are substantial.
The first three columns of Table 1 show the total cost of attendance, tuition and fees and non-tuition expenses for the same categories of institutions as in Figure 1.7 Non-tuition expenses are generally similar, averaging $20,000 to $25,000, across these categories.8 That is what a student who qualified for free tuition would need to pay if they didn’t receive additional financial aid. For many low-income families, that is not affordable. Without additional financial aid, qualifying for a free tuition program still leaves college financially out of reach for many.
Free tuition income thresholds differ across categories of colleges
Although non-tuition expenses are similar across the different types of institutions, the income eligibility thresholds that qualify a student for free tuition are not, as shown in the fourth column of Table 1.9 At public institutions, the average threshold is about $80,000, which is close to median household income in the U.S. in 2024. At private 4-year institutions that are tuition dependent or have large endowments, the income threshold to receive free tuition averages about $100,000. At private institutions with very large endowments, though, the average income threshold is much higher at $167,000. Roughly 80% of all households have incomes below that threshold.10 Eligibility also requires families to have “typical assets” (not explicitly defined), which may reduce the number of students who would be eligible.
How free tuition policies interact with traditional financial aid
Traditional financial aid systems use detailed information on family income and assets to estimate how much a student and their family can afford to pay for college. If that amount is less than a college’s full cost of attendance, that family is said to have financial need. Colleges then combine aid from federal, state and institutional sources to provide financial aid that covers some or all of that “financial need.”
Income-based free tuition policies generally rely on much simpler eligibility rules. Eligibility is determined primarily in terms of satisfying a family income threshold, often accompanied by a requirement that families have assets typical of their income level. If a family meets those eligibility criteria, they are guaranteed enough grant aid to cover tuition.11 As discussed above, though, that guarantee leaves considerable additional expenses uncovered.
At colleges with free tuition policies, families still need to complete financial aid forms so that colleges can calculate financial need. Students receive a single financial aid award that reflects both the college’s traditional need-based aid and its free tuition guarantee. Effectively, the free tuition guarantee specifies a minimum grant award for students with incomes below the free tuition threshold; it means that eligible students receive at least enough grant aid to cover tuition. Students with additional financial need may receive additional grant aid to cover part or all of their non-tuition expenses.12
This discussion highlights two important implications for free tuition policies. First, how will students who qualify for free tuition finance housing, food, books, transportation, and other living expenses? Do they receive additional financial aid? Second, free tuition policies do not simplify the financial aid process. Families with incomes below the relevant income eligibility threshold still need to complete complicated forms each year before learning how much aid they will receive and what they need to pay. Free tuition policies may simplify the message—you’ll receive at least enough aid to cover tuition—but not the process.
Do free tuition policies reduce the price that lower-income students pay?
Because students who qualify for free tuition policies often already received financial aid under the traditional financial aid system, it isn’t clear whether the policy actually changes what those students pay for college. They may have received enough financial aid to cover the cost of tuition regardless of the policy, particularly among students from lower-income families who typically receive the most financial aid.
To investigate this question, I take advantage of net price data I have previously collected at different points of the income distribution from college net price calculators at 200 randomly selected 4-year colleges and universities (community colleges are not included in this analysis). The net price is the amount students pay after all grant-based financial aid is subtracted from the cost of attendance. I have collected these data in most academic years between 2019-2020 and 2025-202613 and calculate the amount of grant-based financial aid awarded by subtracting the net price from the cost of attendance.
Initially, I focus on students at the 25th percentile of the household income distribution, which was roughly $45,000 in 2025. I then examine what students at that income level would have paid in 2019-2020 at the 174 colleges that did not have a free tuition policy at the time.14 I compare the financial aid these students received to the level of tuition and the full cost of attendance institutions charged.15
The results, reported in Figure 2, indicate that for most categories of institutions, the average amount of grant-based financial aid awarded to students at this income was more than enough to cover tuition. Consider, for instance, public 4-year flagship/R1 institutions. Students at this income level received an average of $16,900 in grant-based financial aid, compared to average stated tuition of $15,300. The average financial aid package was more than enough to cover tuition, so a “free tuition” policy alone would not have been as generous. Even with a financial aid package covering more than tuition, college would be difficult to afford for many lower-income students: the average sticker price was $36,000, with financial aid bringing the net price to $19,100.
This pattern is true in all sectors other than tuition-dependent private institutions. Except in that sector, a free tuition policy would not be expected to reduce these students’ net price, on average, because these institutions were already offering a financial aid package (which includes Pell Grants) that covered tuition.16 These are averages, which could mask relevant variation across institutions, but the analysis shows that on average, students with incomes at the 25th percentile of the income distribution already received at least as much aid as they would under a free tuition policy.
How did net prices change at colleges that implemented a free tuition policy between 2019-2020 and 2025-2026? This sample includes 52 colleges that did so. For students at this income level, net prices fell at institutions that implemented free tuition policies. However, average net prices declined about $900 more at those institutions that did not adopt a free tuition policy.17 Although the two groups may differ in other ways that influenced their pricing, this analysis is suggestive that free tuition did not have a sizeable impact on net prices for students at this income level.18
Who benefits from free tuition?
The analysis above suggests that free tuition plans largely did not reduce the net price at a particular point in the income distribution (the 25th percentile). Might students at other income levels benefit? A student benefits from a free tuition policy if they receive a larger grant than they would have under the traditional financial aid system. That system is generally progressive, meaning the amount of need-based grant aid a student receives declines as income rises. At some level of income, the grant a student would receive through that system may be less than tuition—in which case, they would benefit from the free tuition policy. That is most likely to occur for families with incomes close to the free tuition income threshold.
At what income level does the free tuition grant exceed what students would have received otherwise? This is difficult to identify precisely without detailed data on net prices by family income, but I can estimate it using the net price data I have collected for 200 colleges.19 For each of the institutions in the sample, I identify the lowest income at which students are expected to pay less under a free tuition policy compared to the traditional financial aid system. Students with incomes above that level and below the free tuition eligibility threshold benefit from the policy. The details of this analysis are reported separately in an appendix.
Figure 3 reports the results of this analysis, showing the average range of incomes for which students pay less under a free tuition policy. The results indicate that free tuition policies would primarily benefit students whose family incomes fall within a relatively narrow range below the income eligibility threshold. At public flagship/R1 institutions, for instance, that range is $72,300 to $82,400. The range is somewhat larger at private, 4-year institutions with very large endowments largely because their income-eligibility thresholds are so much higher.
Tuition-dependent private institutions are different. At those institutions, all students with incomes below the free tuition threshold would benefit from a free tuition policy. Tuition dependent private institutions typically have higher tuition than public colleges, yet they don’t have the resources to offer as much need-based financial aid; the total grant is often less than tuition, even for relatively low-income students. This is the situation where a free tuition policy actually reduces the net price rather than simply relabeling existing aid. However, few institutions in this category have implemented such a policy; it would be too expensive for them to do so.
The primary value of free tuition policies may be informational
The analysis in this report suggests that many free tuition policies largely relabel existing financial aid; many students who qualify for free tuition already receive enough grant aid to cover tuition. Even if these programs don’t reduce the net price of college much, they have value if they communicate affordability in a way prospective students and their families can easily understand.
Research shows that many Americans view college as unaffordable and often overestimate what students pay, particularly at public institutions. Misperceptions about the returns to college are especially pronounced among lower-income families.
One reason is that prospective students often focus on published sticker prices even though relatively few pay that much. Previous studies have found that many students consider only the published price when evaluating colleges. Enrollment decisions respond to changes in sticker prices even when students’ own net prices are unaffected. Complexity in the presentation of financial aid may therefore discourage some students from considering colleges they could afford.
Free tuition policies may help address that communication problem. A guarantee that tuition will be free below the stated income threshold is easier to understand than a complicated financial aid award assembled from multiple sources and calculated separately for each applicant. Experimental evidence at one university suggests that simplified affordability messages can increase applications and enrollment, even when they provide little additional financial assistance.20
At the same time, free tuition policies can create their own misunderstanding if students interpret them as meaning college will be completely free. Students need to pay for substantial additional expenses beyond tuition. Transparency about those additional costs—and ensuring that the total financial aid package makes them affordable—is important.
Overall, the evidence suggests that many free tuition policies function primarily as a simpler way to communicate affordability rather than as a substantial expansion of financial aid. Their effectiveness should therefore be evaluated not only by whether they reduce students’ net prices, but also by whether they improve understanding of college costs and encourage students to consider institutions they might otherwise dismiss as unaffordable.
Appendix
The results reported in Figure 3 are based on the net price data I collected for 200 colleges and universities in most years between 2019-2020 and 2025-2026. I used college net price calculators to determine the prices charged to students at four income levels ($45,000, $85,000, $140,000 and $250,000) in each of the five categories of institutions separately considered in this analysis. I used linear interpolation to fill in the net price gaps at income levels between these thresholds.
The appendix figure demonstrates this approach, using public flagship/R1 institutions as an example. Each kink point along the “observed net price” line reflects the results obtained from the net price calculator data collection. The segments connecting those points reflect linear interpolation (drawing a straight line between the two points).
This figure also includes a line representing average non-tuition expenses at these institutions, $21,700 (taken from Table 1). If a student received a grant to cover tuition, non-tuition expenses will still remain. If the observed net price is below non-tuition expenses, the student will not benefit from the free tuition policy. They already received more financial aid than free tuition would offer them.
Related Content
Author
-
Footnotes
- These policies routinely include the caveat that families must have assets defined as “typical,” although no specific definition of “typical assets” is advertised.
- Policies that cover the full cost of attendance are rare, so I focus here on the “free tuition” component of these policies.
- The Georgia Hope Scholarship may be the best known of these merit-based scholarship programs, but it does not guarantee free tuition.
- In 2019-2020, 65% of community college students had family incomes below $50,000.
- These categories are determined by incorporating additional data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
- Colleges that are omitted from this analysis include private 4-year institutions with no endowment data, for-profit colleges and colleges with degree programs less than two years. Some colleges in the Washington Post dataset also cannot be matched to IPEDS data mainly because they represent branch campuses of larger institutions. They have been omitted from this analysis as well.
- I calculate this using IPEDS data by subtracting tuition from the full cost of attendance or “sticker price”.
- This analysis focuses specifically on students living away from home, which is common among those attending 4-year institutions. Note that most community colleges do not formally report a single cost of attendance that includes living expenses because they serve predominantly commuter students whose housing, food, and transportation costs vary widely and are not directly charged by the institution. In each institutional category, the cost of attendance and tuition and fees are somewhat higher in those institutions listed in Table 1 that offer an income-based free tuition policy than those institutions that do not offer such a policy.
- In the following calculations, for institutions in the Washington Post data that report a range of income thresholds varying by family size, I assign the midpoint of that range. Some institutions report free tuition policies for Pell-eligible students rather than specifying an income threshold. For simplicity, institutions that do so are assigned an equivalent income threshold of $80,000, recognizing that actual Pell eligibility varies substantially across households. Recent evidence indicates that 83% of families with incomes between $60,000 and $80,000 and 57% of those with incomes between $80,000 and $100,000 are Pell-eligible, making $80,000 a reasonable representative threshold for this purpose (calculated from Appendix Table 1 of the linked report). The reported income threshold levels are estimated solely for institutions where such thresholds exist.
- Princeton University and the University of Chicago have the highest free tuition thresholds at $250,000, more than the incomes of all but about 10% of all American households. Their enrollments, though, are tilted strongly toward higher-income students, so considerably more of their students are not eligible for free tuition even with these high thresholds.
- Here and throughout this analysis, I will assume they also cover fees, which is often the case. Throughout this discussion, financial aid will largely focus on grant-based aid that does not need to be repaid. Student loans and work-study funding still represent costs to students and are not considered here.
- Free tuition programs differ in how federal grant aid, particularly Pell Grants, interact with state and institutional grant aid (“first dollar” versus “last dollar” programs). This distinction can affect students’ net prices because first-dollar programs allow federal grants to further reduce living expenses. Most public sector “promise” programs are last dollar. Because the principal conclusions of this paper do not depend on distinguishing between these program designs, I discuss the distinction only where it materially affects the interpretation of the results.
- The detailed methods used to collect these data are reported in my earlier report. Briefly, I used college net price calculators to obtain estimated net prices at the 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles of the income distribution ($45,000, $85,000, $140,000 and $250,000 in 2025$, respectively). I assigned to each income percentile asset values associated with the same percentile of the wealth distribution.
- The Washington Post database does not indicate the year in which the policy was adopted. In this exercise, I relied on Google searches for institutions identified as having a free tuition policy to determine the year in which it was implemented.
- The tuition and cost of attendance data were obtained from IPEDS. At the time this report was written, the latest available pricing data was for 2024/25. I increased these values using CPI to simulate 2025-2026 pricing.
- At both categories of public institutions, a first-dollar free tuition policy could further reduce net prices below the level of non-tuition expenses. The maximum Pell Grant in 2019-2020 was around $7,800 in current dollars. With net prices falling $1,600 to $1,900 below non-tuition expenses at public 4-year flagship/R1 and other public 4-year institutions at that time, a first-dollar policy could further reduce net prices for these students by $6,200 and $5,900, respectively.
- That difference is not statistically significant. We cannot rule out the possibility (using a 95% confidence interval) that average net prices fell at institutions implementing free tuition policies by up to $600 associated with the introduction of such a policy.
- Similar conclusions emerge when we conduct this analysis separately by category of institution, but the statistical power of that analysis is considerably weaker because of the smaller sample sizes.
- One potential limitation of this analysis is that the 2025-2026 data incorporate the pricing changes that may have resulted from free tuition policies and bias the result of this analysis. I have also conducted alternative versions of this exercise that focus just on those institutions with no free tuition policy as of 2025-2026 and, using 2019-2020 net price data (measured in 2025$), those institutions that did not have a free tuition policy by then. The results using these alternative approaches, reported in the data appendix, are qualitatively similar. I prefer to use the full set of 2025-2026 data because of the broad-based reduction in net prices across the income spectrum that has occurred in recent years.
- A follow-up study that required students to prove financial need to receive free tuition had a smaller effect.
The Brookings Institution is committed to quality, independence, and impact.
We are supported by a diverse array of funders. In line with our values and policies, each Brookings publication represents the sole views of its author(s).
