Tag: Tuition

  • Florida lawmakers pass bill to roll back in-state tuition for undocumented students

    Florida lawmakers pass bill to roll back in-state tuition for undocumented students

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     Dive Brief:

    • Florida lawmakers passed an expansive immigration package this week that would remove undocumented students’ eligibility for in-state tuition rates at public colleges.
    • If signed into law, the reversal would take effect July 1. However, the legislation has intensified a growing rift between the state’s Republican lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis as they compete to show their loyalty to President Donald Trump and his goal of cracking down on immigration.
    • DeSantis heavily criticized the package, saying Wednesday that it “fails to honor our promises to voters, fails to meet the moment, and would actually weaken state immigration enforcement.” The governor said he would veto it unless legislators approved more restrictive immigration measures.

    Dive Insight:

    For a decade, Florida has permitted undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges if they attended their last three years of high school in the state and enrolled in higher education within two years of graduation.

    Republican State Sen. Randy Fine first proposed rolling back the allowance in December as a standalone bill. In January, DeSantis cited the bill as a priority when he abruptly called a special legislative session aimed at helping Trump implement tougher immigration policies.

    Florida has two public higher education systems — the Florida College System and the State University System of Florida, which oversee 28 colleges and a dozen universities, respectively. 

    In the 2023-24 fiscal year, just over 2,000 nonresident students attending one of the university system’s institutions received a waiver to pay in-state tuition, according to an analysis of the bill prepared by the Senate appropriations committee’s staff. In the Florida College System, the number was almost 4,600 that year. The combined discounts were valued at almost $40.7 million, it said. 

    The analysis did not disaggregate the student data by immigration status, and it’s unclear how many undocumented students would be affected by the revocation of the tuition waiver. One report from 2023 estimated about 40,000 undocumented students attended Florida colleges in 2021.

    It’s also unclear if colleges would benefit financially from the end of the waiver, the analysis said.

    “Some students who are undocumented for federal immigration purposes may choose to pay the out-of-state fee while others may choose to withdraw from school,” it said. “Institutions may experience an increase in fee revenue as students pay the out-of-state fees, or experience declines in fee revenue as those students decide to withdraw from school and are not replaced by other students.”

    Republican lawmakers praised the final legislative package — given the backronym title Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy, or TRUMP, Act —  and said it would help the state act in partnership with the federal government. 

    The bill’s sponsors in the Florida House and Senate, as well as the top Republicans in both chambers, also repeatedly invoked Trump’s name in prepared statements.

    “Supporting President Trump’s mission to secure our borders, Florida stands ready to act with the most aggressive immigration policy ever introduced,” said House Speaker Daniel Perez. 

    Senate President Ben Albritton touted the state’s previous work on immigration.

    “When it comes to cracking down on illegal immigration, Florida is already so far ahead of most states,” he said.

    But in a press release two days later, DeSantis’ office dismissed the legislators’ work as a half-measure. 

    Republicans hold a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers of the Legislature. Typically, this supercharged influence would be unlikely to matter, as the governor’s mansion is also held by a Republican.

    But DeSantis’ lack of approval adds uncertainty and diminishes the odds of the package becoming law. Without his approval, it is unclear if legislators would return to the drawing board or if enough Republicans would band together to overrule his veto.

    DeSantis’ popularity within his own state party has weakened recently. 

    The governor’s decision to call the special session did not receive unanimous support from his peers. The dissenters criticized the move as inappropriately getting ahead of Trump’s policies.

    Shortly after the session began, Florida lawmakers ended it and called their own as a means of prioritizing their goals over DeSantis’. And both Reps. Perez and Fine have publicly criticized DeSantis.

    Perez suggested to the Tampa Bay Times on Thursday that DeSantis hadn’t sufficiently communicated with legislators ahead of the session. He added that “all options are on the table” to get anti-immigration legislation passed — including overriding a DeSantis veto.

    The $500 million package seeks to enact measures outside of the higher education sector. It would create the position of chief immigration officer to coordinate enforcement actions with the federal government. It would also mandate the death penalty for undocumented immigrants found guilty of capital crimes — a rule that would run contrary to longstanding U.S. Supreme Court precedent and could spur legal challenges.

    Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, did not mince words in response to the bill’s passage Tuesday.

    “Florida Republicans have lost their damn minds this week,” Fried said in a statement. “Despite attempts from Democrats to protect students, this legislation promises to kick Dreamers out of college before they can finish their degree and gives huge bonuses to local law enforcement for working with ICE to ramp up deportations. It’s an unconscionable abuse of power for a state legislature.” 

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  • Public University Tuition over time

    Public University Tuition over time

    The cost of college has been a hot topic for a while now, and even though some studies suggest the net cost of college has been falling post-COVID, it’s clear that sticker prices have not been. 

    And because the overwhelming majority of college and university students in the US attend public institutions, that’s a good place to start the discussion.

    This is data from IPEDS, showing published cost about 530 public, four-year institutions that award the bachelor’s degree, excluding community colleges that have been creeping into that category over time. Each dot represents an institution, and the data are from 2009, 2016, and 2023 to show long-term trends. The dots are colored by geographic region.

    The data are displayed four ways, from left to right and default to published Tuition and Fees: Resident, Nonresident, the premium nonresidents pay (in dollars), and the premium not residents pay (as a percentage of what residents pay.)  You can change this to show just tuition or just fees by using the control at the top right.

    You can also filter to a single state, if you wish, to get a sense of how that state things about tuition.

    The green-shaded Highlight boxes at right will allow you to make either one institution, one region, or one state standout, without filtering the other data.

    The data are displayed in a box-and-whisker format: The shaded boxes cover the middle 50% of the range, with the dividing line the 50th percentile. The rest of the data are mostly contained within the boundary created by the top bar and bottom bar, with outliers being shown above or below it.  These are not enrollment weighted.

    As always, I happy to hear what you got out of this.  Leave a comment below or send me an email.

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  • Families Use a Variety of Options to Keep Pace with Increasing College Tuition

    Families Use a Variety of Options to Keep Pace with Increasing College Tuition

    Title: Covering the Tuition Bill: How Do Families Pay the Rising Price of College?

    Author: Phillip Levine

    Source: The Brookings Institution

    The increasing costs of attendance at colleges and universities, especially higher “sticker prices,” have attracted attention from both families and policymakers. Although many families are not paying the full sticker prices due to financial aid, today’s families are still facing higher bills for postsecondary education.

    A new analysis from the Brookings Institution examines the different funding sources that families use to pay for four-year nonprofit colleges and how these differ depending on family income. While the findings reflect the different limitations families face based on their incomes, they also suggest that rising net prices mean all households face additional hardships when their children enroll in college.

    Key findings include:

    Middle- and higher-income parents increasingly used their own income and savings.

    • Between 1996 and 2008, payments to colleges from parents’ income and savings jumped by $1,500 to $4,600, depending on the family income and type of institution. These values likely increased again by several thousand from 2008-2020, but specific figures are not available.

    Middle- and higher-income parents have borrowed more.

    • Families with incomes below $50,000 and students attending private institutions saw the highest increases, an average of $1,200, in parents taking out loans from 2008 to 2020.
    • Families with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 borrowed, on average, $800 more in parent loans for students attending public institutions between 2008 and 2020.
    • Parents were more likely than students to take out education loans, especially between 1996 and 2008 and among middle- and higher-income families.

    Students from lower-income backgrounds worked more.

    • Payments to colleges with funds from student earnings increased among families with incomes under $50,000 from 1996-2008. Student earnings likely also covered the bulk of net price increases for lower-income families between 2008 and 2020.
    • Students from families earning less than $50,000 enrolled at public institutions were six percentage points more likely to work in 2008 compared to in 1996.

    These findings provide reassurance that increased student borrowing is not the primary resource for students to cover increased net prices at four-year colleges. Although the student debt crisis continues to gain attention as overall student loan debt has grown broadly, that increase is largely not occurring at four-year nonprofit institutions.

    However, increased borrowing by parents, especially in middle- and higher-income families, is a trend worthy of more attention. Given that lower-income families may be unable to take on parental loans due to creditworthiness, parental borrowing can contribute to increased inequality as cost may prevent lower-income students from selecting the best school for them or from attending college at all. Middle- and higher-income families can face other significant consequences: If parents deplete their assets or save less, they may not be able to retire until they are older or have decreased retirement income.

    To read the full report, click here.

    —Austin Freeman

    If you have any questions or comments about this blog post, please contact us.

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  • Tuition and Fees at Flagship and Land Grant Universities over time

    Tuition and Fees at Flagship and Land Grant Universities over time

    If you believe you can extract strategy from prior activities, I have something for you to try to make sense of here.  This is a long compilation of tuition and fees at America’s Flagship and Land Grant institutions.  If you are not quite sure about the distinction between those two types of institutions, you might want to read this first.  TLDR: Land Grants were created by an act of congress, and for this purpose, flagships are whoever I say they are.  There doesn’t seem to be a clear definition.  

    Further, for this visualization, I’ve only selected the first group of Land Grants, funded by the Morrill Act of 1862.  They tend to be the arch rival of the Flagship, unless, of course, they’re the same institution.

    Anyway, today I’m looking at tuition, something you’d think would be pretty simple.  But there are at least four ways to measure this: Tuition, of course, but also tuition and required fees, and both are different for residents and nonresidents.  Additionally, you can use those variables to create all sorts of interesting variables, like the gap between residents and nonresidents, the ratio of that gap to resident tuition, or even several ways to look at the role “required fees” change the tuition equation.  All would be–in a perfect world–driven by strategy.  I’m not sure I’d agree that such is the case.

    Take a look and see if you agree.

    There are five views here, each getting a little more complex.  I know people are afraid to interact with these visualizations, but I promise you can’t break anything.  So click away.

    The first view (using the tabs across the top) compares state resident full-time, first-time, undergraduate tuition and required fees (yellow) to those for nonresidents (red bar). The black line shows the gap ratio.  For instance, if resident tuition is $10,000 and nonresident tuition is $30,000, the gap is $20,000, and that is 2x the resident rate.  The view defaults to the University of Michigan, but don’t cheat yourself: Us the filter at top left to pick any other school. If you’ve read this blog before, you know why Penn State is showing strange data.  It’s not you, it’s IPEDS, so don’t ask.)

    The second tab shows four data points explicitly, and more implicitly.  This view starts with the University of Montana, but the control lets you change that.  On top is resident tuition (purple) and resident tuition and fees (yellow). Notice how the gap between the two varies, suggesting the role of fees in the total cost of attendance.  The bottom shows those figures for nonresidents.

    The third view looks a little crazy. Choose a value to display at top left, and the visualization will rank all 77 institutions from highest to lowest.  Use the control at top right to highlight an institution to put it in a national context.  Hover over the dots for details in a popup box.  If you want to look at a smaller set of institutions, you can do that, too, using the filters right above the chart.  The fourth view is the exact same, but shows the actual values, rather than the rank.  As always, hover for details.

    Finally, the fifth view is a custom scatter plot: Choose the variable you want on the x-axis and the variable to plot it against on the y-axis.  Then use the filters to limit the included institutions. As always, let me know what you find that’s interesting.

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