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Guaranteed college tuition

Students on the University of Washington campus. Students from low-income families will be guaranteed college tuition coverage starting in 2026. Photo by sea turtle / Creative Commons

WA to guarantee college tuition for low-income families starting in 2026

Forget FASFA; Families who receive food benefits are eligible

Isela Guadalupe Bonilla pored over cryptic instructions and what felt like an endless series of questions about her familyā€™s income as she struggled to fill out the notorious federal form that students are required to complete to unlock college financial aid.

Several of her classmates just gave up. ā€œIt was always because of money,ā€ said Bonilla, now a 20-year-old junior at Washington State Universityā€™s Vancouver campus.

Bonilla eventually puzzled through the lengthy FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, wrangling her reluctant parents to provide their incomes and other information.

ā€œI took a lot of time and effort to teach myself and my family members,ā€ she said. ā€œA lot of people canā€™t and donā€™t do that.ā€

guaranteed tuition

Isela Guadalupe Bonilla. Photo courtesy Isela Bonilla

The FAFSA has long been a sticking point for students, with billions of dollars in federal aid going unclaimed because they simply give up on it, or donā€™t complete it correctly. An overhaul last year meant to simplify the process only made things worse, with delays and technical problems that led toĀ even lower completion ratesĀ and contributed to a decline of 7 percentage points in the proportion of high school seniors going directly to college, according to the National College Attainment Network, or NCAN. This fall, the new form has been released in phases, to test how well it works, and the U.S. House
overwhelminglyĀ passed an act requiring the FAFSA to beĀ released byĀ Oct. 1 every year, a measure that now heads to the Senate.

But some states, including Washington, are proposing to work around the FAFSA altogether and find ways to automatically award financial aid to families that need it.

To try to reverse enrollment declines, Washington in 2026 will start automatically guaranteeing effectively free tuition at all its public colleges and universities to students from low-income families that receive food benefits from the federal supplemental nutrition assistance program, or SNAP. Students will find out as early as 10th grade whether they qualify, which is meant to get families thinking about college earlier.

The state will still encourage students to apply for federal aid, but the new law will at least remove barriers for state scholarships, said Michael Meotti, executive director of the Washington Student Achievement Council, the state agency that will manage the program. Many of these students already qualify for state aid, Meotti said, but donā€™t find out until later in the college application path, if they apply at all.

ā€œWe donā€™t know how many students we lost because of excessively complex processes they had to go through,ā€ he said. ā€œWe wanted to tell students, ā€˜We still want you to fill out FAFSA, but we promise you wonā€™t be getting a bill for tuition.ā€™ ā€

The law would have relieved a lot of stress when she was in high school, said Bonilla.

ā€œIf I had gotten a letter saying, ā€˜Youā€™re qualified to go to college for free because youā€™re getting SNAP benefits,ā€™ that would have made my college process a lot easier,ā€ she said.

The problems with the FAFSA have serious implications for college attendance: High school seniors who complete the form are 84 percentĀ more likely to enroll in college immediatelyĀ than those who donā€™t, while the figure increases to 127 percent among the lowest-income students, NCAN says.

A few other states have also sought new ways to guarantee low-income students that they will be able to afford college, though some of those efforts were short-lived and the fates of others are uncertain.

As students were bombarded by problems completing the FAFSA last spring,Ā West Virginia stopped using it to determine eligibility for state financial aid and said applicants could instead submit proof that they qualified for SNAP or other benefit programs. But the West Virginia higher education office declined to say if it would repeat the offer this year.

In Michigan, an experimentĀ awarded automatic scholarshipsĀ to the University of Michigan to high-achieving in-state students whose familiesā€™ low incomes made them eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. The programĀ more than doubled applicationsĀ to the university among those students, according to research by Susan Dynarski, then a professor at the University of Michigan who ran the pilot program and is now a professor of education at Harvard.

The university, which ended the scholarship experiment last year, declined to answer questions about it. But Dynarski said it illustrated the benefits of easing financial worries for students.

ā€œThey donā€™t have to fill out a form,ā€ she said, noting that the students already would have qualified for a full ride but may not have known it before the program alerted them. ā€œYou can give them an upfront guarantee. Thatā€™s what actually affects college choice.ā€

Statesā€™ and collegesā€™ long reliance on the FAFSA to determine financial aid has made it difficult to get rid of altogether, said Peter Granville, a fellow at The Century Foundation who studies college access and affordability.

ā€œThis year weā€™re seeing the consequences of putting so much dependency on the FAFSA,ā€ he said. ā€œIf we had known years ago that the FAFSA would be delayed by several months, we probably would have built an alternative infrastructure beforehand. There was not a plan B ready to go.ā€

There is, however, at least one major challenge to using SNAP or other federal benefits to determine eligibility: Federal agencies are often reluctant or unable to share personal data about who qualifies, as the state of Washington has discovered.

ā€œWe are working through a little bit of reluctance: ā€˜This is our data, not your data,ā€™ ā€ Meotti said. But several states have used SNAP to determine eligibility for other public benefit programs, he noted. ā€œWe know this isnā€™t forbidden.ā€

That reluctance goes in the other direction, too, said Carrie Welton, senior director of policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success. Colleges are hesitant to pry into studentsā€™ involvement in social service programs.

ā€œNot a lot of institutions are doing it, because student aid administrators are very protective of student data,ā€ she said, ā€œand higher education isnā€™t great at knowing much about public benefits eligibility.ā€

The state of Washington considered targeting Medicaid users before settling on using food benefits to determine eligibility for financial aid, Meotti said. But SNAP made sense as a starting point, he said, because of the significant overlap between families who use the benefits and students who qualify for state financial aid. The state now plans to broaden its college-is-affordable message to seventh graders who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

ā€œWe picked SNAP for a reason,ā€ Meotti said. ā€œSNAP has the deepest reach among low-income households in this state and probably every state in the nation.ā€

guaranteed tuition

Sean Behl. Photo provided by Sean Behl

Sean Behl, who this year transferred to the University of Washington from another public college, said he waited more than six months to hear back about financial aid after filling out the FAFSA this year. It wouldnā€™t surprise him if some students gave up on college altogether because of problems with the application, he said.

ā€œThat period of inactivity can be just awful,ā€ said Behl, who said that he would have qualified for the new Washington program. ā€œIf you have one really awful run-in with something, it can absolutely be a deterrent to doing it in the future. Thatā€™s just human nature.ā€

But some experts have cautioned states not to rely too heavily on alternative methods to determine student aid eligibility. Public benefits programs, such as SNAP, donā€™t include all low-income students, they say, and states shouldnā€™t give up on FAFSA because of this yearā€™s technical problems.

Once those problems are ironed out, the FAFSA is expected to be easier to complete and give students a wider range of scholarship possibilities, said MorraLee Keller, senior director of strategic programming at the National College Attainment Network.

ā€œI have to be optimistic that weā€™re going back to a process that works this year and back to a system that worked for 30-plus years,ā€ she said. ā€œI hate to put all my eggs back in that basket. But I have to put all my eggs back in that basket.ā€

This story was produced byĀ The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. It is reposted with permission. Sign up for the organization’s higher education newsletter or listen to the Hechinger higher education podcast.

About the Author

Matt Krupnick / The Hechinger Report

Matt Krupnick is a freelance reporter and editor specializing in inequity/inequality, education, investigative work, data journalism and the environment. His work has been published by ProPublica, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post and the Hechinger Report, among other national and international publications, and he has produced the ā€œFuture Uā€ podcast.