Even though enrollment at public colleges would increase substantially under Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s free college proposal, enrollment at private colleges would likely take a dive—and diversity at the top public institutions and many private institutions would suffer as a result, according to a Georgetown University analysis of the proposal released Tuesday.
“This report is bad news for Hillary Clinton’s college proposal,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, and one of several scholars or organization heads to assail the plan in light of the new analysis.
“It would likely kill many private colleges that can’t compete against ‘free,’ while increasing separation between elite schools and everyone else,” McCluskey said.
“Perhaps the good news is that it would likely increase enrollment, but that would mainly be in open-access schools and among students who otherwise would not have even considered college if they had to pay,” he said, echoing the report’s findings that the “greatest growth in new students would be among those who had not been considering higher education as an option until it was made free.”
“Considering that six-year graduation rates at such institutions already sit at a dismal 36 percent for first-time, full-time students, that is not good news either,” McCluskey said.
McCluskey made his remarks on the heels of Tuesday’s release of the analysis—conducted by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce—that found that Clinton’s plan would result in an increase in enrollment at public colleges and universities of 9 to 22 percent. Meanwhile, enrollment at private colleges and universities would drop by 7 to 15 percent.
About three-fourths of the growth in public college enrollment would come from overall increases in college enrollment, while the other fourth would come from declines in private college enrollment, the analysis found.
