Face of Nation : In an effort to ease access to college, the University of Texas pledged Tuesday to provide full scholarships to undergraduates whose families make $65,000 or less annually.
The University of Texas System Board of Regents voted to establish a $160 million endowment from the state’s Permanent University Fund in order to offer the scholarships by fall 2020, according to a press release from the university. The money will supplement existing federal and state financial aid programs.
The move will allow the university to fully fund the education of more than 8,600 in-state students, or about a quarter of the university’s undergraduates, the release said.
The endowment will also help alleviate some financial burden for an additional 5,700 in-state students from families with incomes of $125,000 or less. Some of that funding comes from oil and gas royalties earned on state-owned land in West Texas, the release said.
“We all know the struggles that hardworking families are having putting their kids through school,” Board Chair Kevin Eltife told the Texas Tribune. “What we’ve done here is repurposed an endowment into another endowment that will provide tuition assistance to a lot of the working families in Texas.”
The university’s decision comes as the idea of a free college education continues to gain legitimacy in the public eye. Multiple 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have pushed for both free public college and student debt forgiveness as part of their platforms.
Those plans have been met with a mix of skepticism and support — proponents have said a free college education would level the playing field, while critics question where the funding to cover thousands of students’ expenses will come from. The new program at Texas will cover students’ tuition and fees, but not additional living expenses — estimated to be nearly $17,000 for the 2019-2020 academic year. Tuition and fees alone were estimated to be $10,314 for Texas residents.
The gold standard for universities is to have need-blind admissions, meaning that institutions don’t consider a student’s financial circumstances when deciding admission. Colleges that employ the policy sometimes promise to cover 100% of students’ financial need through scholarships instead of loans.
For example, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg donated a record $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University last year to make the university “forever need-blind,” according to an opinion piece he penned for The New York Times.
“This will make admissions at Hopkins forever need-blind; finances will never again factor into decisions,” Bloomberg wrote, adding that he believed the contribution would make the school more socioeconomically diverse and would ease the burden of debt on graduates.
Despite this, even universities that offer to cover students’ demonstrated financial aid might leave students with lingering expenses, meaning that students might still have to take out loans or go into debt to fully finance their education.
This typically happens when a student’s financial need, calculated by the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, overestimates their actual ability to pay for college. Because of this, the “expected family contribution” has been criticized as an unrealistic assessment of how much money students, or their families, should be expected to shell out for school.
But not all universities exclusively rely on the EFC to calculate how much students might owe — UT Austin is among the institutions that may be setting their own standard for financial aid, even if they use information submitted through FAFSA to determine eligibility for tuition support.
It’s unclear if UT Austin employs a need-blind approach to admissions. But the school appears to be one of several selective institutions that have begun offering full tuition scholarships to students below a certain income — for example, the University of Michigan began offering free tuition to in-state students from households making less than $65,000 in January 2018.
And Rice University, a private institution in Texas, announced in 2018 that it would cover the full cost of tuition with grants instead of loans for students making less than $130,000 annually.
