How Low Can You Go? N.C. Colleges Try Free-Tuition Programs

Many small colleges are trying to get more students in the door at a challenging time for higher education. Others want to remain accessible to lower-income applicants. This story is part of Spotlight’s content sharing partnership with The Assembly

Ben Zeidell always wanted to continue his education after earning his associate degree from Caldwell Community College in Western North Carolina. But he couldn’t afford it.

“I come from a background where, you know, I didn’t have a lot of money growing up,” he said. He went to work as a truck driver in Asheville. “I always said, after I graduated from community college, that I’ll get around to doing my four-year degree when I can afford it. … ‘When I can afford it’ never comes.”

Last year, though, college affordability finally arrived for Zeidell—in the form of the Access Ashevilleprogram at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Launched in 2024, Access Asheville covers the full cost of tuition, estimated at $2,061 per semester for in-state residents, and required fees for students who meet certain conditions. For students entering this fall, that includes coming from North Carolina and from a family with an annual income of $90,000 or less.

At 32 years old, Zeidell is a member of UNC-Asheville’s class of 2027. He’s majoring in atmospheric science and, he says, loving it.

Zeidell is among those benefiting from a growing trend among North Carolina colleges and universities: lowering tuition all the way to zero for certain students. For many of the schools, it’s a way to get more students in the door at a challenging time for higher education, with college enrollment trending down and a so-called demographic clifflooming due to falling birth rates.

UNC-Asheville, which had 3,055 students as of fall 2024, began the Access Asheville program out of necessity, said Brian Hart, director of university communication.

“Following five years of declining enrollment, UNC-Asheville prioritized improving and modernizing its recruitment and financial aid efforts,” Hart said. Access Asheville, he said, was “designed to increase access to a university education for all students in Western North Carolina and across the state.”

In The Door

UNC-Asheville is not the only institution in North Carolina trying to entice students with free tuition. While some are grappling with enrollment challenges, others are more concerned with remaining accessible to students from a range of backgrounds.

• In February, William Peace University in Raleigh announced the Peace Pledge, which offers free tuition to students who meet certain conditions, such as being North Carolina residents, coming from households with an income of $75,000 or less, and having a high school GPA of at least 3.25.
• Johnson & Wales University, which has campuses in Charlotte and Providence, Rhode Island, announced The JWU Pledge in January. Starting this fall, scholarships and grants will cover at least 60 percent and as much as 100 percent of tuition for students who meet the eligibility requirements, including household incomes under $200,000.
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in fall 2024 began the Tar Heel Guarantee program, in which in-state students whose families make less than $80,000 per year pay no tuition.
• Also in fall 2024, the state began offering the Next NC Scholarship, which covers tuition at North Carolina’s 58 community colleges for in-state students from households making $80,000 or less, and more than half of tuition and fees at UNC System schools.
• In June 2023, Duke University announced it would begin offering free tuition to current and incoming students from North and South Carolina whose families make $150,000 or less.

What’s happening in North Carolina is part of a national trend. On March 17, Harvard University announced that it will cover all costs, including food and housing, for students from families with incomes under $100,000, beginning this fall. Similar programs have been launched at the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan.

The free-tuition movement spans a wide variety of higher education institutions, said Daniel Klasik, an associate professor in the School of Education at UNC-Chapel Hill who has done extensive research on college admissions and enrollment. He noted that community colleges were among the earliest to offer free tuition.

“At community colleges, I think the free-tuition policies were a way of reinforcing their general mission of being the entry point to postsecondary education that is the most accessible to the most people,” Klasik said. “Elite colleges like Harvard are on the other extreme. Because they are so selective and inaccessible, they have to fight the perception—not entirely incorrect—that they only serve the children of wealthy families.”In between elite institutions and community colleges is another tier that includes institutions such as UNC-Asheville.

“I don’t think people have put as much thought into the middle group—those who are currently struggling for enrollment and who don’t have reputations as strong as the Harvards of the world,” Klasik said. “For a while, these colleges would turn to merit-based financial aid to try to boost their prestige. … Free tuition may be an evolution of those pressures, but here the goal is to just get students in the door.”

That was a factor in the free-tuition program that Johnson & Wales started, said Richard Mathieu, president of the university’s Charlotte campus.

“I was hired as president in 2023, and one of my charges is to grow enrollment, and we are doing that,” Mathieu said.

Johnson & Wales is a private, nonprofit institution with more than 8,000 graduate, undergraduate, and online students. The university had almost 1,700 students at its Charlotte campus in 2018; by 2024, that number had fallen to 1,184, according to the school.

Mathieu said he didn’t expect more than a quarter of Johnson & Wales students to take advantage of the free-tuition program. The university’s chief selling point, he said, is its focus on career readiness. Demand is high in the hospitality industry, for which Johnson & Wales provides a pipeline, he said.

William Peace University, on the edge of downtown Raleigh, has an enrollment of 722—a slight rise from the past two years but well below the more than 900 it had in 2018. A desire to increase enrollment is a factor, though not the main one, behind Peace’s free-tuition program, said Damon Wade, the university’s vice president for enrollment management.

“We certainly would like to see an increase in enrollment on the basis of this initiative, but it wasn’t the primary reason we wanted to do it,” Wade said.

The primary reason was affordability, he said. Peace’s administrators looked at three years’ worth of data that showed that tuition cost–now $33,526 for a full-time student–was a significant problem for many of the families who would otherwise be a good fit for the university.

Enrollment bottomed out amid COVID at around 500 students. Wade said Peace has recovered and stabilized, but he acknowledged that it has to fight for the kind of students who are looking for what Peace has to offer—a small campus with a more personalized education experience. “We have to get in front of them early and often,” he said.

Dollars and Cents

Enrollment is growing at both Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill—by about 12 percent at UNC-CH between 2014 and 2024 and by about 18 percent at Duke in the same period, according to university data. At Duke, where tuition will be $70,265 for the next academic year, making sure the school is accessible to all is the main concern, said Miranda McCall, Duke’s associate vice provost and director of financial support.

UNC-Chapel Hill’s Tar Heel Guarantee program is rooted in similar concerns. The program aims “to ensure that all qualified students, regardless of financial background, have access to a Carolina education,” according to a statement issued by the school’s media relations office. The statement continued: “It is not a race-based initiative but rather an extension of the University’s commitment to affordability and access for North Carolina families.”

That last part of the statement was not just an afterthought.

In a legal challenge to admission policies at Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill, the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that race-conscious admissions programs at those universities violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, effectively ending affirmative action in higher education.

In February, the U.S. Department of Education under President Trump notified educational institutions receiving federal funds that they must cease using race as a factor in admissions, hiring, promotion, or any other area of campus life or risk losing federal funding. The letter said using programs that “appear neutral on their face” as a way to increase racial diversity is also impermissible.

Affirmative action opponents have kept an eye on universities to ensure that attempts to achieve socioeconomic diversity don’t become a backdoor method to pursue racial diversity.

Leaders at the institutions adopting free-tuition programs told The Assembly that they weren’t prompted by the 2023 ruling. Klasik, the UNC-Chapel Hill professor, said the trend was already underway. For instance, the state-funded NC Promise Tuition Plan, started in 2018, sets tuition at $500 per semester for in-state undergraduate students at Elizabeth City State University, Fayetteville State University, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and Western Carolina University.

How widespread free-tuition programs will become is uncertain; the funds to cover them have to come from somewhere. McCall, the Duke associate vice provost, said the free-tuition grants were funded by an award from the Duke Endowment. Johnson & Wales Chancellor Mim Runey said “the support of donors and alumni” made that institution’s free-tuition program possible.

Other universities did not say how their programs are being funded. “Most institutions are probably in similar positions as these two,” said John Lantz, director of higher education for the nonprofit Hunt Institute. “Some may have repurposed scholarships they were already awarding and targeted them in this new way.”

However institutions fund affordability measures, they are increasingly part of the college choice conversation, Lantz said. He added: “Whether it is coming from endowments or from repurposing scholarship programs, either way states need to invest in their higher education institutions to support their growth and to ensure students continue to want to attend the state’s institutions.”

Access Asheville is already having a beneficial impact on Zeidell, who lives in Asheville with his wife, Anna, the artistic director at a fine art print shop. Zeidell is now well on his way toward his goal of becoming a climatologist. He wants to work at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that is headquartered in Asheville. He’s already interning there.

“All the people I’ve met there so far have been encouraging and supportive,” Zeidell said. “Having access to the data at NCEI has been fascinating from a scientific and climatological perspective, and there’s a lot of good work to do there.”

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Dan Holly is a freelance writer based in Durham. He previously was a newspaper reporter and editor, as well as a college professor and administrator.