If anyone needed proof that the escalating price of college tuition will be a topic of great and heated debate in America, the recent showdown between the Governor of California, newly re-elected Jerry Brown, and the new President of the University of California system, Janet Napolitano, should be evidence enough.
Read moreCan Yale -- the formidable pillar of American higher education -- provide education to its students free of charge? Yale senior Eric Stern thinks so. Writing in the Yale Herald, Stern profiles Berea College in Kentucky, a school that offers free tuition to its 1,600 undergraduate students. Extrapolating Berea’s tuition model, and applying it to the vast endowment of Yale, Stern argues persuasively that his Ivy League alma mater can implement the same for its student body. Even applying conservative constraints onto Yale’s finances, the verdict remains clear: every Yale student could attend for free.
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The Campaign for Free College Tuition will work on the federal, state and community level to make America’s public colleges and universities tuition free.
NEW HAVEN, CT – Today, the Campaign for Free College Tuition (CFCT) --freecollegenow.org -- launched with a mission to make public colleges and universities tuition free in all fifty states. Formerly known as Redeeming America’s Promise, CFCT will support and advance state and community programs, as well as a federal plan, providing a tuition free college education to students across the country.
CFCT’s bipartisan effort to eliminate cost as a barrier to college access will be chronicled on their new website, which has also been designed to highlight a robust collection of federal, state, and local programs seeking to address postsecondary access and affordability. The constantly growing database of efforts across America, will allow CFCT to collaborate and partner with organizations, as well as with elected officials and the business community, towards shared goals.
On Thursday, November 20th, The Campaign for Free College Tuition will participate in PromiseNET 2014. This conference gathers organizations that are committed to offering free college tuition for high school graduates in their communities, which means we’ll be surrounded with people who have the same goals as we do.
Read moreDavid Mann was born in raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His parents would have had a difficult time paying for college had he
lived in any other city.
Now a Ferris State University sophomore and offensive tackle for the school’s football team, David’s family encouraged him to attend college and pursue his sports marketing dreams. But it wasn’t until the fall of 2005, when the Kalamazoo School District unveiled the Kalamazoo Promise, that that dream became a reality.
The Kalamazoo Promise is a pledge by the district to pay the college tuition for any graduate who got accepted at any of the state’s 59 colleges or universities. Made possible by a generous donation from a group of anonymous, local philanthropists, the Promise offered to pay 100% of tuition for students who went through its entire school system and a proportional amount for those who attended fewer grade.
Read moreIf anyone needed further evidence that the inflationary rise in tuition is out of control, the latest analysis by Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center on the income levels of those borrowing to pay for college should convince any reasonable person that something has to be done about the problem before it eats away at the very foundations of our nation’s economy:
Fully half of the students graduating in 2012 who came from high income families had borrowed to pay for part of their higher education, double the rate from 1993. Similarly, 62% of graduates from upper middle income families had borrowed money in 2012, up from only 34% two decades ago. Of course the rate of borrowing among lower middle income and lower income families was even higher, involving as many as three out of four graduates, but the increase among wealthier families meant that for the first time in American history a majority of ALL students from every income group graduating from college in 2012 had to borrow money to pay for an increasingly out of control rise in the price of higher education. What was a problem for just lower income families when Pell Grants were first created has now become a problem for all of America.
Read moreThis is a guest blog by Bill Deresiewicz, New York Times Bestelling Author of "Excellent Sheep."
“So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Those words came out of the mouth of one of my students at Yale. For me, the last two words summed up the dilemma of elite education as it has come to exist in America. The system manufactures students who are "excellent," yes—great at jumping through the hoops that we hold up—but also "sheep": incapable of finding their own direction in life once they've gotten to the end of the hoops.
Read moreIn an age of partisan gridlock and finger pointing, it is truly refreshing to learn about a politician who isn’t afraid to make bold 
promises and keep them. The Republican Governor of Tennessee, Bill Haslam, took on the established higher education interests in his state to create the Tennessee Promise program that will make its 13 community colleges and 27 trade and technical schools tuition free starting this fall. To do so, he had to tackle critics from the left and right who were unwilling to give up their own ideological talking points to sign up for a program that will help the state close the skills gap that is currently hurting its economic growth.
Our organization has a mission that is ambitious but simple: to make free college tuition a reality for Americans across all fifty states. To that end, supporters met in Washington, DC, on Friday, September 12, 2014, to map out an action plan.
Joining the meeting were the honorable James Blanchard, former governor of Michigan, Michael Castle, former governor of Delaware and Congressman, and advocates such as Cryn Johannsen, expert on the student loan crisis, and RAP President Morley Winograd, author of several ground-breaking books on the millennial generation.
At the meeting, we affirmed our commitment to three goals:
1. By 2018, a majority of Americans agree strongly with the idea that college tuition should be free.
2. By 2018, the federal government has implemented a process to enable interested states to make their public colleges tuition free.
3. By 2018, at least three states are implementing plans to make all of their institutions of higher education tuition free.
Read moreThe fight for free college tuition continues. And the Campaign for Free College Tuition is on the front lines.
That’s why on Friday our leadership team, endorsers, and volunteers will convene a Campaign for Free College Tuition Strategy Summit in Washington DC to review CFCT’s values and mission and to create detailed outlines and action plans of how to execute our strategies. Our goal is clear: to tame the cost of college tuition and prevent further price increases that put a higher education out of the grasp of the majority of Americans.
Our goal is to make higher education a possibility for every American, without regard to their financial circumstances.
We have a lot to do and not much time to do it, so your support is critical for our campaign to succeed. It’s with your investment that we can fundamentally reform how higher education is financed in this country, opening the doors to a more equitable society.
If you agree with our goal, our plan, and the urgency of the problem, we ask that you give what you can to help us write the next chapter in our nation’s history of continuously expanding access to universal, free education.
