When it came time to decide where to enroll for college, Maggie Stearns hit a crossroads.
Would she attend a public university in her home state of Georgia, one with a larger student population and more varied social offerings to boot? Or Emory University, a smaller, private research institution in Atlanta known for its academic prestige and high ranking? The biggest difference: cost.
At Emory, Stearns would have about 60 percent of tuition and fees covered under Emory Advantage, a need-based grant and scholarship program that aims to replace federal loans. The aid package was enough for her to opt for the college, where she’s now a sophomore.
But the financial burden still worried her. “I’m honestly the person out of my family who is the most like, Should I really be staying here even, if it’s so expensive?” Stearns said.
Now Emory officials say they plan to expand that program next fall by making tuition free for students whose families earn less than $200,000 a year. Other private colleges have taken similar steps: Tufts University, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College now offer the same deal with a $150,000 cap; at St. Joseph’s College, in Maine, the cap is $100,000. Wake Forest University and Lenoir-Rhyne University recently announced free tuition for qualifying in-state students.
Concerns about student debt, college affordability, and the dreaded enrollment cliff are largely driving the trend of eye-catching free-tuition offers. If cost uncertainty is a major barrier to low-income students’ applying and enrolling in universities like Emory, the new effort may be a tipping point, said Katharine Meyer, a fellow in the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings.
Experts on financial-aid policy say colleges have been offering generous grants to qualifying students for a while. It’s the positioning of these opportunities that’s changing.
“A lot of these pushes are changes in marketing efforts, rather than changes in net financial aid,” said Brad Hershbein, a senior economist and deputy director of research at the W.E. Upjohn Institute.
More Aid Amid Rising Costs
The original Emory Advantage program began back in 2007 to provide loans for students demonstrating exceptional need. In 2022, the program expanded by replacing need-based loans with scholarships and grants.
About 3,100 students receive financial assistance through Emory Advantage, 60 percent of whom have scholarships already equal to or higher than the cost of tuition. Under the new Emory Advantage Plus, this number is expected to grow to nearly 80 percent, expanding Emory’s financial commitment to more than $1 billion over the next four years, according to the university.
“When students sit at the kitchen table with their parents to discuss college, I don’t want finances to be a consideration,” said Leah Ward Sears, Emory’s interim president, in the announcement. “If they qualify to come to Emory and they want to come to Emory, we will make sure they can afford Emory.”
The change makes a difference for Stearns, the sophomore. Her parents, both public-school teachers, have been saving for college since before she was born. She’s been working since she was 15 to help subsidize some of the cost, but it still wasn’t enough for an institution like Emory.
“I’ve considered transferring because of how expensive it was this year and last year,” Stearns said. “I was also considering taking a semester off or graduating a semester early, so I wouldn’t have to pay for all that extra tuition.”
The boost in aid, she said, “has meant that I’m able to stay at Emory rather than going to one of the public institutions that Georgia has.”
John Leach, associate vice provost for enrollment and university financial aid, told The Chronicle that a “healthy chunk” of the program is supported by operational funding and the university’s $11-billion endowment, among the largest at private colleges.
Sustaining that support going forward won’t be easy, though. Emory’s tuition increased nearly 6 percent from 2024 to 2025, to $67,000.
The college will also have to contend with a big change in 2026: In July, President Trump signed into law a tiered system for calculating the endowment-tax rate, and Emory is anticipating a rate increase to 4 percent from 1.4 percent.
“It’s going to make it more difficult for [universities] to provide robust financial aid to students,” said Steven Bloom, assistant vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education. “And so it’s going to hurt low-income students and middle-income students probably the most.”
“The fact that Emory is finding a way, despite the tax, to enhance their financial-aid programs, is a credit to their commitment to enhancing access,” he added.
‘A Careful Calculus’
Hershbein, the Upjohn Institute economist, predicted that institutions like Emory may account for added costs by raising tuition for full-paying students.
One important nuance, said Meyer, of Brookings, is that institutions like Emory can only afford such generous offers by enrolling a relatively small share of low-income students over all.
“If all of a sudden 80 percent of their incoming class was Pell-eligible, their revenue model wouldn’t work anymore,” Meyer said. “When colleges choose a high-cost, high-aid model, they can enroll some lower-income students, but they still need higher-income students to pay full price to subsidize those programs.” (Emory’s share of Pell Grant recipients in the 2024-25 first-year class was 21 percent, up from the previous two years, a spokesperson said. Nationwide, nearly 40 percent of first-time, full-time undergraduates receive Pell Grants.)
Many colleges offering free-tuition deals, Hershbein added, won’t end up distributing that much more student aid than they otherwise would have.
But institutions will attract more student applicants from lower-income families, he said. More applications will subsequently lower admission rates, thus making the college more selective.
“It’s a careful calculus in terms of how much the colleges are doing this to game the system kind of thing, and how much are they doing it because they really want to increase financial aid for people who need it,” Hershbein said. “It’s a bit of both.”
It remains to be seen whether an approach like Emory’s will have a trickle-down effect across the country. Hershbein said most institutions don’t have the endowment size or financial capacity to keep pace with their highly selective counterparts, and this may affect their long-term viability.
“There’s going to be a lot of pressure, even more so than usual, on a lot of smaller colleges that have been losing enrollment for some time now. … The sector is clearly in trouble. The ones that have deeper pockets are generally going to do better, but cost pressures are still going to rise,” Hershbein said. “So even if you’re trying to give out more financial aid, someone’s got to pay for that.”
Another factor in play for selective colleges like Emory is that they are looking for ways to maintain student diversity without considering race in admissions. (Emory’s 2024 first-year class — the first to be admitted under the new U.S. Supreme Court ruling that barred the consideration of race — had roughly the same racial demographics as past cohorts.)
“As institutions are more affordable, that is going to lead to more socioeconomic diversity,” said Meyer, at Brookings.
But the university’s recent decision to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, following mounting federal pressure to ban race-conscious offerings or risk federal funding cuts, may affect some students’ interest in taking advantage of free tuition at all, experts warn.
“Low-income and high-income students of color alike would look at an institution and see a pullback of DEI offices and be skeptical that this is an institution that is going to support their pathway through college,” Meyer said. “I think that’s a very real concern that students and families might have.”
While the new initiative hopes to encourage, rather than dissuade, enrollment from a range of applicants, policy experts are careful to warn this isn’t a catch-all.
“Obviously these tuition-free guarantees are meaningful aid for students, but tuition is not the only expense that students face,” Meyer said. “These students will still feel real affordability issues when it comes to their living expenses going through college,” which she added may create barriers for the students the program aims to help the most.
