Free Tuition Offers Announced by More Top Universities

College became a lot more affordable for a lot more students and their families late in 2024. In November, a group of selective universities announced that they would expand their free tuition programs to include many more lower- and middle-income students.

On November 19, the University of Pennsylvania and Brandeis University issued announcements saying they would expand their free tuition offers while adding a broader range of incentives for more potential students. Then, Carnegie Mellon University, the nine-campus University of Texas System, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all said the following day that they would also expand their free tuition offers. And later that week, the University of Massachusetts and St. John’s University issued similar announcements as well.

Earlier in 2024, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, the University of Richmond and Colby College had all introduced free tuition initiatives. And although they are by no means identical, many of these programs seem remarkably similar.

For example, Carnegie Mellon University announced it would offer free tuition to students whose families earn under $75,000; for students whose families earn under $100,000, the college said it would replace student loans with need-based grants. Carnegie Mellon’s tech rival MIT, in turn, said it would boost the free tuition threshold to $200,000 and pay for room and board for students from families who make $100,000 or less each year.

The University of Pennsylvania had previously offered free tuition to students from families earning less than $140,000 per year, but in November, that threshold was raised to $200,000. The school will also pay for textbooks, courseware, and room and board for students from families earning less than $75,000.

Like Carnegie Mellon, Brandeis said it would waive tuition for families who make less than $75,000. Brandeis also said it would offer 50 percent discounts to families who earn less than $200,000. Additionally, the University of Texas said it would waive tuition systemwide for Texas residents whose families make less than $100,000.

“This is about sending a clear message that college is affordable,” said James Milliken, the chancellor of the University of Texas System, during remarks about all the free tuition announcements. “That’s what we’re doing, that’s what MIT and Brandeis are doing, and I think that’s really important.”

Although it remains unclear precisely why so many selective colleges are suddenly offering free tuition to students from lower- and middle-income families, three possible reasons have been suggested in the education press. And although less apparent, two other potential reasons might turn out to be just as significant.

Defusing Public Resentment Through Affordability

Inside Higher Ed’s Liam Knox speculated that the torrent of affordability announcements had occurred “at a time when public resentment of elite institutions has reached a fever pitch.” He also reported a related explanation from Dr. Tania LaViolet, the director of the Washington, DC-based Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program:

It’s part of a broader marketing and recruitment effort to raise awareness of the financial aid resources at colleges with staggeringly high sticker prices—she calls it a “clear cost” initiative. And as more colleges expand financial aid, it creates a domino effect among peer institutions looking to compete for highly qualified applicants from lower income brackets, she said.

“There’s been a greater microscope on affordability at these institutions. People are asking, ‘Are they fulfilling their public purpose to support economic mobility for American families?’” she said. “And these initiatives are working. I think institutional leaders are beginning to pick up on that, and that’s why you’re seeing this surge now.”

Effects of the FAFSA Fiasco

The U.S. Department of Education’s botched rollout of the new FAFSA system also damaged families’ confidence in the financial aid promises they received from various colleges. At first, the fiasco had even appeared to have reduced enrollments among low-income and first-generation students.

However, in January 2025, NSCRC, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, acknowledged that a serious methodological error resulted in incorrect enrollment values. That’s because the NSCRC inappropriately counted dual-enrollment high school seniors—most of whom were taking community college classes—as college students. Late in 2024, the Education Department had noticed an inconsistency in the NSCRC’s totals when ED’s financial aid reports showed that the number of students receiving federal aid had actually increased by five percent.

The Affirmative Action Ban’s Backlash

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action also probably played a part that led to all the free tuition offers. At Carnegie Mellon, Black and Hispanic students in the 2028 class declined from 16 percent to only 8 percent, a 50 percent decrease. At MIT, those students’ enrollments fell from 25 to 16 percent, a 36 percent drop.

However, less apparent reasons might also exist. It seems like a curious coincidence that almost all of these colleges were named as defendants along with the College Board in federal antitrust litigation filed in October.

The plaintiffs—a Cornell University alumnus and a student currently attending Boston University—allege that 40 private institutions continuously engaged during the past 19 years in an anticompetitive, price-fixing conspiracy to lower their students’ financial aid awards.

The University of Pennsylvania’s new free tuition proposal even goes so far as to knock out the issue that forms the core gravamen of the plaintiffs’ class action complaint. That happened when Penn said it would no longer require noncustodial parents to declare their assets and income as part of the expected family financial contribution toward their child’s college costs. Penn had previously required that declaration even though those noncustodial parents are usually divorced and don’t financially support their son or daughter.

When all the private institutions in the suit allegedly conspired to require those declarations in restraint of trade, those actions artificially reduced the amount of financial aid paid to the family class members in violation of Section 1 of the landmark 1890 Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1. The complaint argues that without the agreement, “defendants would have competed in offering [greater] financial aid in order to enroll their top candidates.”

These are serious allegations. If the 40 colleges lose in court, under the Sherman Act, they might face severe penalties known as treble damages. Only applied to the most egregious legal violations, these penalties would require the court to award the members of the plaintiff class three times the amount of actual damages that the jury determines.

There’s also another potential driver of these free tuition offers, one that every college president nationwide now undoubtedly knows about. On November 7, a big-budget blockbuster study of American colleges was released that so far appears to have received little coverage in the national mainstream media, with articles only appearing in Forbes, Fast Company, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed. Institutions that don’t want any more public resentment of elite colleges and universities will certainly want to keep this study’s incendiary results as quiet as possible.

The study concludes that even though the rate of overall college attendance by low-income students has soared from less than 10 percent at the start of the 1900s to more than 60 percent today, that trend has not affected elite colleges and universities at all. At those schools, low-income students have always been overwhelmingly underrepresented—and continue to be overwhelmingly underrepresented today.

In other words, the purported trend toward “democratization” of these elite institutions has never existed. Moreover, no historical development like standardized admission testing or the GI Bill has changed the socioeconomic makeup of these elite institutions in any sort of meaningful way.

What’s important to note about this study is that the researchers didn’t base their conclusion on a small statistical sample. Instead, this research is unique in that it’s a population study. Over five years, their team’s associates meticulously reviewed 2.5 million records of every student during the past 100 years who attended America’s 65 most selective institutions: the Ivy Plus private universities and the Public Ivy flagship state universities.

The team found that before World War II, students from families among the top 20 percent of wealth earners accounted for 70 percent of students at these private universities, and 55 percent at the public universities. But after briefly falling during the late 1980s, these proportions quickly rebounded back to their prewar levels—and that’s where these percentages remain today.

Finally—in what appears to be the study’s most shocking disclosure—students from the income distribution’s bottom 20 percent have accounted for only about 5 percent of students at the elite Ivy Plus private universities continually during the past 100 years.

Titled “The G.I. Bill, Standardized Testing, and Socioeconomic Origins of the U.S. Educational Elite Over a Century,” this study was released by a team of economists affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research and led by Dr. Ran Abramitzky, a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Collaborating scholars include Dr. Santiago Perez, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Jennifer Kowalski, a consultant with National Economic Research Associates in San Francisco, and Dr. Joseph Price, a professor of economics at Brigham Young University.