Cepeda: Free college not the panacea its proponents promise

A small earnings boost, coupled with student loans that can never be discharged through bankruptcy, sounds like a raw deal to the first-in-their-family students who have been most encouraged, inspired and practically pushed into pursuing a college degree.

So while the campaign-speech catnip of free college sounds enticing to those who want a shot at a middle-class life, the benefits of a free educational lunch may be nothing more than a crowd-pleasing mirage.

A study by the Brookings Institution on one of the first randomized control trials of a debt-free college program looked at students in the Milwaukee Public Schools program who were promised up to $12,000 to pay for college — an amount that would cover all tuition and fees at the local two-year college or at most of the in-state four-year institutions. But the study found that the incentive had no effect on whether students went directly on to college from high school.

The programs didn’t randomly hand out free tuition like candy, either. Students were required to graduate on time from a Milwaukee public high school with at least a 2.5 cumulative grade-point average and a 90 percent class-attendance rate.

Students were required to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which, because it requires tax information, often serves as a proxy for how much the student’s family supports their desire to attend college.

Still, even though the students in the program did exhibit more motivation to attend college, the totality of the investment in getting the students across the finish line of a degree was not significant.

More research needed

The American public, with its aspirations of meritocracy, seems unlikely to ever support a program that doesn’t require, at a minimum, the middling grades that produce a 2.5 GPA (about a high C or low B). This bar can be harder to reach for low-income students who are struggling against many factors to make the grade.

Worse, according to the study, even though performance standards seem like they might “induce students to work harder and become more academically prepared for college,” they don’t. “The main effect of performance requirements, then, is to provide more funds to higher-income families, which only reinforces existing disparities.”

As with so many other well-meaning efforts to reduce inequalities in society, free college seems like it has great potential but requires far more pilot programs and longitudinal research.

Before making promises to young people, we must design programs that won’t have the unintended consequences of leaving needy students economically insecure after promising them that college is the ticket to a financially prosperous life.