How Governors Can Give All Students 'Freshman Year for Free'

As the rising costs of tuition and fees outpace increases in financial aid and student debt skyrockets, there has never been a more critical time to bring innovation to our higher education system. We are here to share the one thing student loan lenders don’t want you to know: There is an entire year’s worth of top-flight college education courses leading to real college credits, available for free, online right now. If you’re a governor, state education leader or a parent looking at paying the high cost of college, this message is addressed to you.  

Over the past decade, the cost of college tuition has increased by a crushing 71 percent, putting higher education out of reach for many high school seniors, adult learners and others. In 2017, nearly half of all students who dropped out of college say they did so because of cost. Politicians nationwide are scrambling to find ways to do something about this crisis, which has led to more than $1.3 trillion in student loans. A college degree is still the surest path to a good job for many people. But higher education — at about 9.9% of state spending — is already the third largest budget item for state and local taxes, after K–12 and Medicaid. And increasingly, the student’s tuition cost — with an average $38,600 four-year price tag for in-state residents at public universities — is out of reach.

Fortunately, there is a new, simple, and exceptionally inexpensive program that governors and states can adopt right now to lower the cost of tuition by up to 25 percent and create an immediate “on ramp” to college for students.

Modern States Education Alliance, a philanthropic organization dedicated to making college more affordable and more accessible, has pioneered “Freshman Year for Free,” through its website ModernStates.org. It provides more than 30 top quality online college courses to anyone for free, and can lead to a full year of real academic credit at more than 2,900 traditional colleges and universities, from Purdue to the University of Wisconsin to Morehouse.

The courses are taught by top university professors, and include free online textbooks as well, with one course for every subject tested by the College Board’s well established College Level Examination Program (CLEP). The CLEP exams have been around for more than 50 years, and are particularly useful because they can be taken by people of any age, any day of the year, at 1,800 different assessment centers worldwide.