This is a subject I’ve written about before on the Saverocity Forum, but now that I’ve got this whole finance blog I can share it with a bigger, smaller, or at least different audience than regular Forum visitors.
Anyone can get a tuition-free higher education in the United States. I’m going to show you how, and tell you why you won’t believe me, even after I spell it out for you.
Identify colleges and universities that accept only the FAFSA
There are two primary sets of documents prospective college students complete in order to determine their eligibility for financial aid:
- the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, is a form developed by the federal government to establish eligibility for federal student aid programs;
- the CollegeBoard CSS/Financial Aid PROFILE is a private application used by some colleges and universities to establish eligibility for institutional financial aid.
In order to receive federal or institutional financial aid, all colleges and universities require students to fill out the FAFSA. A subset of those colleges and universities require students to complete the PROFILE in order to be eligible for institutional aid.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of a comprehensive list of colleges and universities that don’t require the PROFILE. However, CollegeBoard does helpfully provide a list of colleges and universities that do require it.
Your goal in this step is to identify colleges and universities that you’re interested in attending that are not on that CollegeBoard list of PROFILE institutions.
Select institutions that promise to meet full demonstrated financial need
Once you’ve identified a group of colleges and universities that accept only the FAFSA, and don’t require the PROFILE, visit the financial aid website of each institution to determine whether and how they promise to meet the full demonstrated financial need of admitted students. You can usually find this promise advertised fairly prominently, and additional details about how it works, for example on Harvard’s financial aid website.
Establish residency (optional)
If you’ve selected a public college or university to attend, you’ll likely need to establish in-state residency in order to take advantage of in-state tuition and any financial aid guarantee. This typically takes a year or more of living and working in the state without taking classes, in order to prove that you didn’t move to the state exclusively to establish residency for education purposes. By way of example, here are the residency requirements for the University of California system.
Establish independence
In order to establish independence for purposes of federal student aid, you have to answer yes to one of the following questions:
- Will you be 24 or older by Dec. 31 of the school year for which you are applying for financial aid?
- Will you be working toward a master’s or doctorate degree?
- Are you married or separated but not divorced?
- Do you have children who receive more than half of their support from you?
- Do you have dependents (other than children or a spouse) who live with you and receive more than half of their support from you?
- At any time since you turned age 13, were both of your parents deceased, were you in foster care, or were you a ward or dependent of the court?
- Are you an emancipated minor or are you in a legal guardianship as determined by a court?
- Are you an unaccompanied youth who is homeless or self-supporting and at risk of being homeless?
- Are you currently serving on active duty in the U.S. armed forces for purposes other than training?
- Are you a veteran of the U.S. armed forces?
Establishing independence is key to tuition-free higher education because once the FAFSA has determined you are independent, it does not require any financial information from your parents.
If Tagg Romney waited to turn 24 before going to college he could have applied for financial aid from the University of Utah without submitting any information about his dad’s income or assets (he went to BYU instead, which also doesn’t require the PROFILE, although they may have their own financial aid forms).
Take out only federal student loans
Federal student loans, besides their attractive interest rates, allow you to repay them using “income-based repayment,” which caps your monthly payments at a certain percentage of your disposable income, and allows you to discharge the loans after 20 years of repayment (10 years if you work in the public sector).
This ensures that whatever career you embark on after college, you’ll never be financially crippled by student loan payments, no matter how much you borrow — as long as you borrow exclusively from the federal government.
Every story you have read in the past 10 years about people being hobbled by their student loans is a story about someone who didn’t follow this one simple rule.
There is no crisis of college affordability
Public higher education for those of limited means in the United States is very reasonably priced. It’s heavily subsidized by taxpayers, alumni, and endowment income, and it’s sold far below cost. By following the steps in this post you can make it even more reasonably priced by excluding your parent’s income and assets from your financial need calculation.
The crisis of higher education affordability is one of class anxiety and economic insecurity. Parents, even parents who themselves may not have graduated from college, understand perfectly well that higher education is an essential class identifier and the surest path to a semblance of economic security.
I can find no more telling indicator of this than the polls we’ve been bombarded with by the news media for the past two years in which “working class” was a shorthand reference to adults without a college degree — regardless of their income or profession! In this world your humble blogger is “middle class” while a unionized UPS driver making $70,000 a year is “working class,” just because he didn’t graduate from college.
And that is why you will not wait until you establish independence before attending college and why you’ll pressure your kids to attend college immediately after high school or, at most, after taking a “gap year” doing something expensive. The fact is you’re much more anxious about how your peers and your children’s peers will view the decision to put off college than you are about the cost of college.
We can fix that crisis, but only by creating a society and economy of plenty, where the desperate struggle for middle-class respectability and a semblance of economic security doesn’t shape every decision we make. Until then, nothing in this post will be of the slightest help to you.
So do you suggest these kids live with Mom and Dad for the 5-7 years that they delay starting college for?
Haley,
I do not! I suggest they get a job, start a business, read widely and deeply, have fun, learn about the world and themselves. Being fluent in English is a very valuable skill in a lot of parts of the world, so teaching English is one of the very many ways “these kids” could keep themselves busy, but I don’t prejudge the question of what they should be doing.
—IF
My middle is sort of doing this.
He is taking Community College classes but he is in no rush to start at a 4 year. He will be 22 next month so I need to investigate how FAFSA determines your age. Is he 24 the year he turns 24 or only if he is 24 by the file date? Can he just file late?
He discovered that Community Colleges have study abroad programs (and since you pay full tuition plus fees for those programs this is a huge savings).
I think a sounder solution for those who can’t get into Top 100 schools, or highly specific/lab-intensive programs, but who am independently motivated, would be going the degree by examination route from a regionally accredited institution like Charter Oak State College (Connecticut), Thomas Edison State University (New Jersey), or Excelsior College (New York). While the “Big Three” institutions will not offer institutional aid, they qualify for the same Federal financial aid, including access to Pell grants and federally subsidized student loans.
There are numerous forums online discussing distance learning and credit by examination, such as degreeforum.net, degreeinfo.com, and degreediscussion.com. as well as paper resources like Bear’s Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning (available at many local libraries). Highly motivated individuals have been able to earn bachelor’s degrees in less than one year through this.
Good financial advice, but I’m not sure if it’s good family advice.
If nearly everyone followed this advice, the system might fall apart, too.
Or bust your butt in high school so you get large scholarships and can afford a good school. Or have your kid take AP courses in HS. Or look for universities that take retroactive credits so one course will count as 12+ credits. Or make your kids go to community college for a year or two to drastically cut your expensive courses down
I don’t understand. Are you saying you can go to college for free by taking out student loans? If that is true, I guess I can get a free TV by buying it with a credit card.
jimmy,
You can go to college tuition-free. You may need to take out loans to pay for room and board, but as I explained, repaying those loans is contingent on your future income, so it’s a risk-free way of financing college.
—IF
Clickbait. Nothing in this article is a secret, and college isn’t free unless you’re willing to waste the first half of your twenties waiting to establish independence while also failing to make a good living. Saverocity is better than this.
College is too expensive. Public funding of public universities has dropped precipitously in the past forty years. Costs are transferred from state governments onto students. Forty years ago, you could finance an entire year’s tuition by working a minimum wage job over your summer break. Today, it’s barely possible while working the entire year — and that’s only tuition. Room, board, and living costs make it impossible. Boomers (and later, many Gen Xers) have renounced any responsibility to future generations and enacted many regressive policies (especially in education funding) that are all but guaranteed to leave this country in a worse shape than how they inherited it.
So instead of some happy-go-lucky, wish-the-problem-away clickbait that fails to address the very real problems in the U.S. higher education system, maybe stick to what you know.
The other way to get free college from a top 100 university for someone who is willing to smile at strangers way too early in the morning and occasionally clean a restroom is to work at Starbucks and take advantage of their tuition reimbursement program with Arizona State. Starbucks will hire most people that don’t use drugs, follow simple directions, are cheerful, have open availability, and can coherently answer basic interview questions.
ASU is tuition free if you work 20 hours a week and are a junior or senior, For freshman and sophomore year you would either test out, use AP/IB credit, or go to
a community college. http://globalassets.starbucks.com/assets/39415f5a386a47259479e9f553246eef.pdf
calwatch,
Interesting suggestion!
—IF
Bah. How much you borrow is completely immaterial. What matters is if you get a STEM degree. If you don’t, you’re just pissing away your money on a worthless piece of paper and delaying your earnings. All too many are sold a mountain of BS about the necessity of a degree. What a load! Go look at how many baristas or bank tellers or salespeople have degrees – not one of them get any value for having that crappy Business, English, History, Sociology or whatever other useless degree they wasted 4-6 years and tens/hundreds of thousands getting.
Easily 75% of people attending college are just wasting their time and pissing money away. Drop out. Go drive a truck. Pound nails. Fix engines. Learn some sort of trade and save your pesos. Then start a small business. That’s the way to financial independence.
Mser,
I fully agree with your general sentiment (although not about the value of STEM degrees versus other degrees). Whether someone decides to pursue higher education or not, and whatever subject they decide to study, they’ll almost always be better off paying less for the degree rather than paying more. Getting a job (or starting a business!) right out of high school and learning something, anything, about yourself and about the world is virtually certain to increase the value of whatever degree someone eventually decides to pursue.
—IF
This is definitely not “free”, and saddles you with loans for up to 20 years. I’m certainly still paying mine.
I am a huge supporter of public higher education and working during school (also not mentioned is doing AP classes in high school to get college credit, which was a huge help for me) but I fail to see anything in this article that gets students college education for free. Loans are not free. Income-based loans are great loans but they are still loans. You’re still paying money. You’re still paying interest. I thought we had moved past the disingenuous idea that loans are free, of colleges hiding tuition on their websites or burying it under ‘Financial Aid.’ The only true way to get a free college eduction is with scholarships and advanced placement credits.
JDH,
The steps in this post can get you college TUITION-free. You’ll usually have to take out student loans (or pay with savings) for room and board, for somewhat boring tax reasons. I’ll write another post on that subject since people seem confused by it.
—IF
There are no steps to other than considering qualifying for in state tuition by taking a year or so off. Marriage is not a step. Waiting six years to turn 23 is not a step. Hoping your parents die is not a step. Joining the military for four years is not a step. Asking your parents to take a half salary to make under eighty grand a year is not a step.
The point of the article is actually good. Tuition and fees in America can be reduced or eliminated in various situations you already have or through proper planning and school selection. But you can’t take steps to make an expensive college free.
Shonuffharlem,
Are you making some kind of linguistic point? What would you call the things I described besides “steps?”
—Indy
Everyone seems very focused on getting to 24 to establish independence. However the much easier route is to find someone else who also needs to establish financial independence and get married. I don’t believe there are any rules about having to live together. You can even be legally separated, just not divorced.
Tom,
Yep, lots of ways to skin a cat! How do you like the new blog?
—Indy