Costs Beyond Tuition: Meeting the Needs of Today’s Students
By Wayne Taliaferro
Headlines remind us every day that post-high school education costs are a huge barrier to learning. We’ve watched student loan debt skyrocket to record levels, and we’ve seen tuition rise exponentially. But there’s another cost burden that is just as devastating: the costs beyond tuition, ranging from students’ housing to food to childcare.
Earlier this year Lumina Foundation partnered with the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) to assess their financial policies and supports for adult learners and strengthen their ability to provide these types of resources for students. It was a proactive move by CSCU, and just one of the many investments we’ve made in the past year as part of our emerging ‘Costs Beyond Tuition’ strategy.
About 61 percent of the cost of four-year public colleges is made up of non-tuition expenses, and those costs are nearly 80 percent at community colleges. A recent PBS NewsHour special noted that the cost of student housing alone has risen by 82 percent in the last 30 years. It’s a complex issue: one that needs smart solutions. In 2018, Lumina released Beyond Financial Aid, a toolkit to help colleges better understand and serve low-income students to promote their success. Now we’re thinking even further about how we can ensure that all of today’s students have access to these types of supports.
The development of the ‘Costs Beyond Tuition’ portfolio was a natural progression in our affordability strategy driven by growing evidence, racially disparate impacts, and compelling advocacy to combat student basic needs insecurity. But it was the voices of students that struck a unique chord in the process.
The story of one student parent and advocate stuck out profoundly. She talked about the long hours and sacrifices, the stigmas and stereotypes, and of course, the costs — childcare, transportation, and more. She said it felt like an endless cycle of moving one step forward and two steps back while navigating a system that didn’t seem to be designed for students like her. But more than anything, she talked about wanting to be seen — not for show or political expediency — but authentically seen, centered, and supported.
As advocates like her helped move these issues to the forefront of education policy conversations, we’ve seen increased national awareness and piecemeal progress. That’s highly commendable, but our solutions must shift from piecemeal wins to large-scale supports and investments that reach all students. Over the past year at Lumina, we’ve been quietly working with our partners and those long dedicated to these issues to think about what that looks like. As a result, we’ve invested in three early approaches:
· Useful research to build more evidence that informs policy, and supports and demonstrates best practice
· Support to college systems and state agencies to build greater capacity to respond to these needs, and
· Locally led issue advocacy to advance and sustain state and national changes
Then, we helped launch a variety of projects by grantees with expertise in these areas. We began by partnering with uAspire, a nonprofit focused on helping students navigate financial barriers and increasing transparency about costs. They analyzed how institutions calculate and communicate indirect expenses — efforts that are not always done with high transparency — and subsequently engaged with students to better understand their experiences. Their findings will help clarify costs, put students at the center of defining needs and solutions, and spark large-scale change.
We also partnered with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality to research and model what the “full cost” of college really looks like today and how it varies across students’ demographic characteristics. And we partnered with the Urban Institute to better understand the real-time financial needs of low-income students by using state longitudinal data in Virginia. These projects are critical because, to address costs and needs, we have to accurately understand and predict them.
We also awarded grants to support work on campuses and across state college systems to reduce other barriers. We worked with the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice to help six Texas public colleges find better ways to determine students’ financial needs, provide more accurate cost estimates, and proactively support students with expenses. As mentioned, we worked with Connecticut State Colleges and Universities to audit their system’s policies and resources, and design plans to be more responsive to students’ financial needs. And we continued our support of the Center for Law and Social Policy to help state systems of higher education and agencies support their college completion agendas by expanding access to public benefits for eligible students.
At the same time, we continue to help build awareness and drive issue advocacy. It’s why we partnered with the National Skills Coalition to help diverse state coalitions lead comprehensive agendas aimed at addressing costs beyond tuition in a number of states. Likewise, our work with Demos is helping to bridge partnerships with local racial justice organizations to inform more equitable postsecondary affordability policies. And its why we’re working harder to amplify student and local voices across all our work.
What We’re Learning
The early outcomes of this work show promise. We’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing partners, engage passionate and insightful communities, learn a ton, and hopefully support students for years to come. This past summer, we convened our portfolio grantee partners, alongside practitioners, researchers, students, and experts from across higher education and other industries to push our collective thinking even further on these issues. We shared expertise, focused on the needs of students, and talked candidly about racial equity. What emerged were these eight cross-cutting themes that offer us a strategic framework for moving ahead:
Advancing a comprehensive affordability agenda for today’s students is no easy feat and will require a reimagining of our priorities, policies, practices, and resources. Each of these guiding themes presents its own set of political and economic debates, but momentum is growing every day across institutions, in state legislatures, and on Capitol Hill to ease student hunger, housing, and childcare needs.
I’m constantly moved by the strength and resilience of today’s students, particularly those who have been persistently underserved and underestimated. Every day I’m doubly conscious about what they’re up against and where our systems and policies have fallen short. It’s our collective responsibility to rewrite that narrative — boldly and unapologetically. This work is just the beginning. We have a saying at Lumina: “Everything should be easy about education after high school except for the learning.” It’s well past time that we made postsecondary affordability easy for today’s students once and for all.
