- 71 percent of students with financial aid vs. 55 percent of students without would would prefer free tuition at a school nobody has heard of over paying tuition at a prestigious university.
- More Asian students (42%) prefer a prestigious university over free tuition than students of any other race.
As 2020 presidential contenders hit the campaign trail, making college more affordable has become a major issue in the race for the Democratic nomination. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released the boldest plan yet, aiming to eliminate up to $50,000 in student loan debt for everyone with a household income of less than $100,000. To gauge how strongly college students feel about constantly rising tuition fees, we asked if students would rather pay full tuition at a highly prestigious university or get free tuition at a school nobody has heard of. The majority of students (67 percent) say they’d rather have free tuition at a university nobody has heard of, compared to 26 percent who would rather pay for a more prestigious diploma.
Results are based on a recent College Pulse poll conducted among 8,887 students currently attending four-year colleges or universities across the United States. Those who answered had the option to choose “full tuition at a prestigious university,” “free tuition at a university nobody has heard of,” or “not sure.”
Majority of Students Prefer Free Tuition Over a Prestigious Diploma
Would you rather pay full tuition at a highly prestigious university or free tuition at a school nobody has heard of?
Using College Pulse Insights — our predictive intelligence and statistical analysis platform — to correlate this survey question with the more than 15,000 variables in our database, we found interesting relationships between students’ backgrounds and their feelings on free tuition. Students with differing financial circumstances were more divided than students overall, with more students on financial aid preferring free tuition at a university nobody has heard of than students without financial aid (71 percent vs. 55 percent). Black or African-American students are also more likely to prefer free tuition at a university nobody has heard of than students overall (74 percent vs. 67 percent), while 49 percent of Asian students say the same.
More Black or African-American Students Choose Free Tuition Over Prestigious Universities
Nearly three-fourths of Black or African-American students would rather have free tuition at a school nobody has heard of than pay full tuition at a highly prestigious university
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Methodology: This poll was designed and conducted by College Pulse. Interviews were conducted among a sample of 8,887 full-time and part-time students attending four-year colleges or universities in the U.S. who are part of College Pulse’s American College Student Panel. To reduce the effects of any non-response bias, a post-stratification adjustment was applied based on demographic distributions from the 2017 Current Population Survey (CPS). The post-stratification weight rebalanced the sample based on the following benchmarks: age, race and ethnicity, and gender. The sample weighting was accomplished using an iterative proportional fitting (IFP) process that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables. Weights were trimmed to prevent individual interviews from having too much influence on the final results.
About College Pulse: College Pulse is a leading online survey and analytics company dedicated to understanding the attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of today’s college students. College Pulse offers custom data-driven marketing and research solutions, utilizing its unique American College Student Panel and online analytics platform which provides insight to brands, companies, and organizations. College Pulse’s platform includes 240,000 undergraduate college student respondents from more than 800 four-year colleges and universities in all 50 states. To learn more about College Pulse, please contact Jake@collegepulse.com.
