Free tuition pulls thousands of college students back to the classroom

Community college enrollment took a steep dive during the COVID-19 pandemic, hitting its lowest numbers in 30 years. Now, colleges across the Bay Area are trying to lure students back with a tactic that might be hard to resist: free tuition.

“When I first started, it was like a ghost town,” said Omolola Atolagbe, who began at Oakland’s Laney College in 2021. “Now, you see students everywhere — in the library, the student center, all over campus.”

Laney is one of four colleges in the Peralta Community College District that is waiving course fees for the 2022-23 academic year — an attempt to not just reduce costs for students, but to get them back into the classroom.

So far, the program has paid off: there are nearly 2,200 more students enrolled in its four campuses this spring compared to last, with a 33% increase in Black students and 22% increase in Latino students.

Any student who is a California resident and completes the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is eligible for the district’s Spring is Free program, even if they don’t qualify for that federal aid. It’s a result of the federal government’s Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, which dispersed $10 billion to community colleges across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through those federal dollars, Peralta also waived last semester’s tuition.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, community colleges across the country — which have higher proportions of Black, Latino and low-income students than many four-year schools — have borne the brunt of higher education enrollment challenges. In California alone, there was a nearly 17% drop in the number of students enrolled in two-year schools across the state from 2019 to 2022, according to data from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office.

In the fall of 2020, a national study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University found community college students were far more likely to be worried about contracting COVID than their peers at four-year schools, and concerns about being able to afford college were nearly twice as prevalent among community college students.

The study found that by November of 2020, people planning to enroll in 2-year colleges had cancelled their plans at more than twice the rate of those gearing up for a four-year institution — with 40% citing job loss as the main reason for doing so, as high proportions of community college students work to afford attending their classes.

That’s despite the fact that most low-income (and even some middle-income) students rarely pay full tuition at the state’s community colleges. Those schools provide multiple streams of financial aid to support their students, contributing to some of the lowest tuition rates among 2-year colleges nationwide. Still, many students attending community colleges do not apply for federal financial aid, either because they are unaware of the funding or do not know how to apply.

“I think it’s a great idea, and I think that in some ways, it’s a marketing effort,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “A very large share of community college students across the state don’t pay fees at community colleges. But a lot of people still believe that college is unaffordable.”

Similar programs using the same federal dollars have also popped up elsewhere in the Bay Area and across the country, said Thomas Brock, the director of the Community College Research Center. In San Mateo County, both Skyline and Cañada colleges have waived their enrollment fees for county residents during the spring of 2023.

Despite that, the cost to attend college has only grown. Today, it’s more expensive to attend a higher education institution in the state than ever before, despite overall decreases in tuition cost, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. In the last two decades, the institute found that the price of going to college in California has spiked by 50 to 100% due to a jump in housing prices and other living costs.

Though enrollment numbers picked up slightly last year, California’s 116 community colleges are still grappling with the ripple effects of enrollment losses. And that decline was ever more dire at Peralta colleges. In 2019, more than 11,300 students attended Laney College. By 2022, that number had dropped to just over 8,600 — a 25% loss.

Now, the college district is hoping tuition support could reverse that trend, along with other sorts of financial aid, like free lunches, a food pantry, free parking, and more. Peralta’s Alameda College, for example, is also providing $500 grants to students enrolled in six or more units.

The program won’t last forever. Though Peralta is exploring options to reduce tuition costs next year, the federal funds will be used up after this academic year.

“Growing up in Oakland, and living and seeing how people are disenfranchised, I just know that there are people who don’t get access to education because of their cultural background, or their ethnicity, or their economic background,” said Alison Fletcher, a student at Laney who is taking advantage of the Spring is Free program. “This kind of program gives those people a fighting chance.”