How Well Do Students Understand “Free Community College”? Promise Programs as Informational Interventions

Abstract

Given the low price of community college relative to need-based aid, last-dollar “free community college” (i.e., Promise) programs often only marginally reduce students’ real costs. Given this reality, some claim that these programs impact students largely through “messaging”: information conveying the affordability of community college. However, it is unclear how such messaging works in concept or practice. Drawing on a case study, I document the paradoxical ways last-dollar community college Promise programs alter students’ understanding of college affordability. Reflecting program marketing, students typically understood the program as simply “free college,” with little grasp of last-dollar structure or eligibility criteria. Many believed the Promise program paid their tuition, but administrative data showed the program funded very few students. Student misunderstanding of the program is traceable to a baseline conception of college as “expensive” and to a tenuous grasp of need-based aid. Promise programs’ “messaging effects” are predicated upon such prevalent misconceptions. The “message” is a mixture of clarification and misdirection, revealing a factual situation (that community college is often “tuition-free”) through an equivocation (that the Promise program is making it free).