But HAIL makes that fact explicit: It isn’t that students can apply and have the chance to afford the college—if they apply and are accepted, it is guaranteed.
This reassurance is what many people are looking for and can be the difference in considering college, and actually going out and applying.
the students were given clear information that going to college—and to an elite college, at that—was a real possibility.
I think the most important thing is making sure that people know that going to college can be a real possibility.
In some cases, the students enrolling at Michigan wouldn’t have gone to college at all had they not had been contacted.
This just shows the importance of this scholarship and how effective it and similar ones can be at getting more people who may be hesitant to go to college.
Students who received the mailing were more than twice as likely to apply to the University of Michigan compared with a control group. The percentage of low-income students enrolling at the university more than doubled as well—from 13 percent in the control group to 28 percent in the group of students who received the mailer.
This just goes to show how impactful free college can be. Given the opportunity much more people will want to apply and go to college, but because tuition prices are so high, this prevents people who may be facing financial hardship.
At 38 such institutions in the United States, more students come from households in the top 1 percent than from those in the bottom 60 percent.
This is such a glaring discrepancy and one of the main reasons that I believe that college should be free. Just because someone comes from a low income household shouldn't prevent them from trying to further their education.
Charging education to the future isn’t changing educationfor the future.
I do agree that there should be a better solution rather that just putting more burden on future generations.
Making tuition and fees free to students is unlikely to move the needle much in terms of completion, as community college is already free to low-income students, where it is covered by the federal government’s Pell Grants, and yet we continue to see paltry completion rates.
With free college I think that students will have more options to explore in finding a schools that is the right fit for them, and in some cases community colleges don't fit what students are after. Having free public universities gives students the freedom to chose without having to worry about their financial situation.
because colleges were built to optimize research and teaching, not learning (and there’s a big difference between teaching someone something and whether someone has in fact learned what was taught).
I do agree with there being a difference between teaching something and making sure the person actually learned what was being taught. Often times there is so much information to process through multiple classes that I find myself just trying to memorize the right answers as opposed to actually learning the material.
life balance—juggling responsibilities outside of college—is a more significant reason students leave. And it becomes far trickier to keep one’s life in balance the longer a program runs—a major reason students need new, faster and more modular postsecondary options than traditional college.
If college were free then I believe that people would make more of an effort to prioritize it, so despite not being the top reason that students leave school I think that the cost plays a major role in many of these other reasons why people don't purse further education.
A whopping 40% of first-time, full-time students fail to graduate from four-year programs within six years. The rate is worse at two-year colleges, where only 39% of students complete.
I don't necessarily believe that the time in which a student graduates college is too important but rather what they learned during that time so that they can be better set up for the future.