WATERVILLE, Maine — For Emily Kayser, the prospect of covering her son’s college tuition on a teacher’s salary is “scary. It’s very stressful.” To pay for it, “I’m thinking, what can I sell?”
Kayser, who was touring Colby College with her high school-age son, Matt, is among the many Americans in the middle who earn too much to qualify for need-based financial aid, but not enough to simply write a check to send their kids to college.
That’s a squeeze becoming more pronounced after several years of increases in the prices of many other goods and services, a period of inflation only now beginning to ease.
“The cost of everything, from food to gas to living expenses, has become so high,” Kayser said.
Middle-income Americans have borne a disproportionate share of college price increases, too. For them, the net cost of a degree has risen from 12 percent to 22 percent since 2009, depending on their earnings level, compared to about 1 percent for lower-income families, federal data show.
Now a handful of schools — many of them private, nonprofit institutions trying to compete with lower-priced public universities — are beginning to designate financial aid specifically for middle-income families in an attempt to lure them back.
“This is a group, particularly in private colleges, where it just does not make sense to them, in many cases, to send their children to the colleges and universities that might be the best fit,” said David Greene, Colby’s president. “Many of them are feeling, frankly, a little stretched with everything that’s going on.”
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Colby has announced a program that will take effect next fall to attract prospective students in the middle. It will cap the cost of tuition, room and board at $10,000 a year for families who earn up to $100,000, and $15,000 for those with incomes of from $100,000 to $150,000.
That’s compared with the current net price at Colby of up to about $53,000 a year for people in those income brackets, after existing discounts and financial aid.
The new, guaranteed lower price for middle-income families, underwritten by a $10 million gift from an alumnus, figures prominently in Colby’s outreach to prospective parents and students, popping up among the scenic promotional photos of stately red-brick Georgian revival buildings encircled by the Maine woods.
When she heard about it, “I felt the weight come off my shoulders,” said Kayser, of Westchester County, New York, who remembered being so relieved when she finally paid off her own substantial college loans that she framed the receipt.
The anxiety among middle-income families about costs is having an effect on universities and colleges, whose proportion of students from those families has been declining. Their presence on U.S. campuses fell from 45 percent in 1996 to 37 percent in 2016, the Pew Research Center found using the most recent available federal data. Middle-income Americans make up 52 percent of the population, Pew estimates.
Those drops might not seem particularly ominous. But in a complex balancing act, colleges badly need to appeal to those middle-income families that can afford to pay at least part of the price.
“That group of students is their bread and butter,” said Jinann Bitar, director of higher education research and data analytics at The Education Trust, which advocates for equity in education. “That’s why they’re trying to keep this group in the mix. Some inflow is better than no inflow.”
Related: The students disappearing fastest from American campuses? Middle-class ones
The slowing drip in the number of middle-income students on campuses also comes as enrollment overall has been falling for a decade, meaning institutions need all the students they can get. At the same time, the proportion of students from lower-income families enrolling directly in college has been going up.
“Maybe we’ve done a better job with the lower-income students — that, yes, there is financial aid for you for college,” said Jill Desjean, senior policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “And maybe the middle has heard the message that financial aid is just for lower-income families.”
This perception isn’t entirely true, Desjean said. Middle-income families can qualify for some federal, state and institutional financial aid.
“A lot of it is messaging — trying to simplify the message out there that, yes, we understand tuition is high, but there are programs you’re eligible for,” she said.
The median household income as determined by the U.S. Census Bureau is $77,540. Pew defines “middle income” as ranging between two-thirds and twice that much, or from $51,176 to $155,080.
Families with annual incomes of from $75,000 to $110,000 get less than half as much financial aid as people who make under $48,000, federal figures show.
That can make college a struggle, even when both parents work, and especially in families with several children and with assets such as houses.
“Anyone who has to borrow or use financial aid to afford college is getting squeezed. That’s the gist,” Bitar said. “There are a lot of middle-income families that are really worried about access to college, and those voices have been loud.”
In his previous role as vice president for enrollment and student success at Trinity College in Connecticut, Angel Pérez saw how financial aid calculations could disadvantage middle-income families.
“If you add the layer on top of that of the skepticism about the value of higher education right now, we are seeing more middle-income families just not getting into the pipeline or enrolling,” said Pérez, who is now CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
Meanwhile, the disconnect between the prices colleges advertise, and what they actually expect people to pay appears to particularly frustrate many middle-income families.
At Colby, a private liberal arts college, the published total cost for this academic year is around $90,000, for instance. But half of families already get some form of financial aid.
“I have a hard time with a price tag that’s so high, and they say, ‘Don’t worry, you’re never going to pay that,’” said Ryan Paulson of Traverse City, Michigan, on a tour of Colby with his wife, Kate, and their daughter, Annie, and who was speaking about the college admission process in general. “Just tell us the price.”
Part of Colby’s strategy is to simplify what Greene called “this overly byzantine and complex system,” by showing the maximum amount a student will be charged based on his or her family’s income.
“It’s pretty simple. If you make $200,000 a year, you’re going to pay no more than $20,000 for tuition, room and board,” he said. “We try to keep it as clean and easy as we can.”
Many parents, at all income levels, don’t know about the full range of financial aid that might be available to them, a survey by the lending company Sallie Mae found. More than half think money goes only to students with exceptional grades, and nearly 40 percent believe it’s not worth bothering to apply if they make what they assume is too much money.
The Paulsons’ goal for their daughter “is for her to not fall in love with any school, knowing that, being in the middle, we might not be able to afford it,” Kate Paulson said.
The universities and colleges that have begun making financial aid available specifically for middle-income families are typically wealthy and highly selective.
With a student body of 2,300, for example, Colby has an endowment worth more than $1.1 billion and accepts just 7 percent of applicants. The campus tour includes a new $200 million, 350,000-square-foot athletic complex that’s so big and high-tech, opposing teams have taken to calling it the Death Star.
Rice University, a private research campus in Houston, is seeking to raise $150 million by the end of this academic year to continue a program it began in 2019 of giving full-tuition scholarships to undergraduates from families that earn between $75,000 and $140,000.
Related: Universities and colleges that need to fill seats start offering a helping hand to student-parents
Many institutions say they’re trying to appeal to these families because they want to balance the socioeconomic representation on their campuses.
But another major reason is to help address an ongoing decline in enrollment projected to get much steeper beginning next year.
“If the enrollment issue is a struggle for your university or college, you’d better be thinking about how you price things, in a simple and straightforward way,” Greene said.
Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia, cited affordability issues it said were discouraging middle-income applicants when it announced a “Middle America Scholarship” providing up to $6,395 this year to families with annual incomes between $35,000 and $95,000.
Grinnell College in Iowa offers scholarships toward what it calls “felt” financial need among middle-income families frustrated that the calculations of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, overstate what they can actually afford.
Some prospective students “are squeezed out of eligibility for need-based financial aid even though they do not have the financial wherewithal to fund higher education without assistance,” said Brad Lindberg, Grinnell’s associate vice president of institutional initiatives and enrollment.
The problem for colleges, he said, is that families like those “assume they’re not going to be eligible for financial aid, so they just don’t apply. People exclude themselves from the process before the process even starts.”
Greene, at Colby, said that could be among the reasons that only a little more than a third of Americans now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey — down from 57 percent in 2015.
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“The value proposition of higher education relative to its cost is a huge question mark in the minds of many people,” he said. “That’s why I think there’s such extraordinary discontent about America’s colleges and universities, because middle-income families are the ones that have been squeezed out of those top places.”
Targeting middle-income families with designated scholarships appears to be working, according to some of the colleges that have already been doing it.
“We’ve seen a nice bump in applications,” said Karen Kristof, assistant vice president and dean of admission at Colorado College. “We’ve seen a better yield.”
Since 2019, the private college has limited the cost of room and board to about $16,000 a year for Colorado families with annual incomes between $60,000 and $125,000.
“This is a group that felt neglected in the need-based system” that favors lower-income applicants, Kristof said.
Now, more colleges and universities are setting out to boost the people in the middle. A donor has helped the public University of Montana double, to $15 million, the annual amount available from its Payne Family Impact Scholarship for in-state middle-income families.
“We had a clear understanding and feedback from families in Montana that we just didn’t have enough to offer in the middle-income range,” said Leslie Webb, the university’s vice president for student success and enrollment management.
Some advocates warned that colleges shouldn’t forsake their lowest-income applicants in the cause of helping middle-income ones.
“It’s crucial for colleges to still target their limited resources to students with the lowest incomes,” said Diane Cheng, vice president of research and policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
The institute calculates that a typical middle-income family has to spend 35 percent of its annual household income sending a child to college for a year. “That’s a pretty substantial share,” said Cheng. But for the lowest-income Americans, she said, a year in college consumes the equivalent of nearly one and a half times their annual household income.
“Institutions typically have limited resources for providing financial aid,” Cheng said, “and we want to encourage them to balance their desire to attract students from middle-income families with supporting students from low-income backgrounds.”
Still, institutions are increasingly focused on this issue, said Art Rodriguez, vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid at Carleton College. The private institution in Northfield, Minnesota, also offers scholarships specifically to families in the middle.
“The number in the middle is decreasing,” he said, “so colleges are making efforts to try to not lose that middle.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.
This story about middle-class families paying for college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.