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Even though it may cost my college some enrollment, I have to tip my cap to Rutgers University this week. It unveiled a program that, while imperfect, is actually simple enough to cut through the noise. That’s an underrated virtue.
It’s called the Scarlet Guarantee. On the New Brunswick campus (which is the flagship), students who attend full-time, have in-state status and are pursuing their first bachelor’s degree get free tuition if their family’s adjusted gross income is under $65,000. If it’s higher than that but under $100,000, tuition is capped at $5,000.
The program excludes many students. Those who attend part-time, for example, aren’t eligible. Graduate students and out-of-state students aren’t eligible. It’s capped at four years per student, so a student who takes longer will eventually have to pay the usual price. And it only applies to tuition and a few fees; it doesn’t cover housing, food, books or other living expenses. It’s a far cry from universalism.
It’s an extension of the Garden State Guarantee, which offers two years of free community college to students from families with AGI below $65,000 and then offers two more years of free tuition at any state college or university. The new part is the price cap for students whose families fall into the $65,000–$100,000 range, which is a lot of students.
That’s the part I consider especially noteworthy. It applies a clear rule to a benefit for which a lot of people will be eligible. It’s the sort of thing that a normal person could understand.
That matters tremendously.
Being middle-class in America involves being lied to a lot. Low introductory rates that change before you know it, insurance that doesn’t cover what you bought it for and predatory fine print are par for the course. (“If the salary is competitive, why won’t you tell us what it is?”) In that context, wonky and complicated financial aid programs—even if well intended and even if actually generous—trip many people’s scam detectors. Terms like “sliding scale” and “ability to pay” register differently on the receiving end, where people have learned through experience that a program’s definition of “ability to pay” may be far removed from reality.
The breakthrough of the Scarlet Guarantee is that it involves an actual dollar figure. You don’t have to submit a bunch of forms and then wait for months to see what you get. (In fairness, it’s a last-dollar program, so you do still have to submit a bunch of forms. But at least you’ll know the outcome in advance.) And it’s a cap, rather than a price, so it’s possible for aid to make the price lower than that. Given how expensive central N.J. is, that may be necessary.
Obviously, I would have preferred a truly universal program. Dropping the income cap altogether would help, both for students whose families are just above the cutoff and for students whose families have fluctuating income from year to year. Allowing part-time students a similar benefit would make sense, especially because part of the reason that many students attend part-time is money. Charging them more hardly seems fair.
But this is a meaningful step forward, and it gets one big idea right: when it comes to paying for college, (relative) simplicity is a virtue. Nicely done, Rutgers.
