What is Affordable Community College Tuition?: Part I

Abstract

During the last 25 years, there has been a major shift in the way that state and federal governments fund financial aid to students attending colleges and universities. This shift has been characterized by the idea of “cost sharing”—a “high tuition, high aid” model that requires students and their families to shoulder a greater percentage of the burden of the cost of higher education. Unfortunately, however, like much market-driven public policy that has been developed over the last 25 years, we are beginning to see that this policy works better in theory than in practice. This funding model is especially problematic for community college students because it has put higher education functionally out of reach for many Americans, especially the most financially disadvantaged within our communities. It is the argument of this article that we have reached the economic threshold where “open access” is being fatally compromised by high tuition costs and by student aid being operationally redefined during this period in terms of loans and debt.