On July 6, 2026, Davidson College announced that it would go tuition-free for families earning up to $175,000 a year. Families earning $85,000 or less will pay nothing at all, not for tuition, not for fees, not for housing or meals. For a school just up the road from me here in the Charlotte area, one of the most selective liberal arts colleges in the South, that is a remarkable thing to put in writing. Axios Charlotte framed it as a middle-class win, and it is.

We on the left have been arguing for free college for a long time. For most of that time, critics called it a fantasy. It cost too much. Taxpayers should not foot the bill. People should pay their own way. The phrase “free college” became shorthand for something naive, a line item that could never survive contact with a budget.

And then, quietly, the richest schools in the country started doing it on their own.

The impossible idea, delivered by the last people you would expect

Davidson is not alone. In March 2025, Harvard made itself tuition-free for families earning under $200,000, with families under $100,000 paying essentially nothing. MIT, Princeton, and Yale have made similar moves. One by one, institutions sitting on endowments larger than the GDP of small nations decided that charging tuition to middle-income families was no longer worth it.

There is a story the market tells about itself in moments like this. It says the system worked. Congress never acted. No new tax. Private institutions, responding to competition and their own generosity, solved a problem the government could not. CNBC called it an “affordability arms race,” and that phrase is worth sitting with, because an arms race is not the same thing as justice.

We should take the win. Students who would have graduated with crushing debt will not. That is real, and it matters. But we should also be clear-eyed about what this is and what it is not.

Free, but not for the students who need it most

Here is the uncomfortable part. Many of the students who would benefit most from free tuition at a place like Davidson will never apply. Not because they cannot get in. Because they do not believe schools like Davidson are for them.

This is not a hunch. It is one of the best-documented findings in the economics of education. Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery documented it in The Missing “One-Offs”, a paper that reshaped how we talk about college access. They found a large, hidden population of high-achieving, low-income students who never apply to a single selective college, even though these colleges would likely admit them and, once you count financial aid, often charge them less than the local public university would. These students sit one or two to a town, far from the dense clusters of applicants that elite schools already recruit from. The schools were not looking for them, and they were not looking for the schools.

Hoxby, this time with Sarah Turner, then tested a fix. In What High-Achieving, Low-Income Students Know about College, they mailed students simple, personalized information: what these colleges actually cost after aid, how to get application fees waived, where they stood a real chance. The intervention cost a few dollars per student. Students who received it applied to more selective schools, got in more often, and enrolled more often. The barrier was never only money. The barrier was information, and information reaches families as unequally as wealth does.

A system that was never built for them

None of this is an accident. Elite colleges spent most of their history as finishing schools for the already-comfortable. They served wealthy families, legacy applicants, prep school graduates, and students who could afford private counselors to package them into ideal candidates. Admissions have diversified since then, but the machinery of advantage did not disappear. It adapted.

A first-generation student in a rural North Carolina county still has to overcome a lifetime of signals telling them that Davidson is a school for rich kids. Free tuition does not undo those signals. It sits behind them. You cannot benefit from an aid package for a school you never believed you could attend.

And even a student who does believe it faces a gauntlet that has nothing to do with tuition. Someone has to tell them the school is attainable. Someone has to help them make sense of the FAFSA and the CSS Profile. They need recommendation letters, time to write essays, money to visit campus, access to the advanced courses that make an application competitive in the first place. Removing tuition removes one gate. The other gates are still standing, and the students born on the wrong side of them are the same students, generation after generation.

Why now?

It is worth asking why the richest schools discovered their generosity at this particular moment, because the timing tells us something.

Two things are happening at once. The first is the demographic cliff that Nathan Grawe has been warning about for years. The number of traditional college-age Americans is falling, the result of a birth-rate decline that began around 2008. Every college in the country is about to be competing for a shrinking pool of eighteen-year-olds. The second is that the wealthiest institutions are the only ones with the endowment payouts to fight that war with free tuition as their weapon.

So yes, this is generosity, and it is also strategy. Financial aid has become a competitive advantage, and only a handful of schools can afford it. That should worry us. If the richest colleges become free while regional public universities and small private schools keep charging tuition they cannot lower, we are not watching higher education become more equal. We are watching it stratify, with a tuition-free elite pulling away from everyone else. The schools that educate most working-class students are precisely the ones that cannot play this game.

The second phase

The point of all this is not that free tuition failed. It is that free tuition was only ever the first phase, and the institutions with the most money are delivering it piecemeal, on terms that suit their own survival.

The first phase was making elite colleges affordable. We should celebrate the students it reaches. But the second phase is harder and less flattering to the market, because no endowment payout can solve it. It means outreach, counseling, and information reaching students in every county, not just the ones already on a recruiter’s map. It means public investment in the schools that actually serve the working class, not just applause for the ones serving the comfortable. It means treating access as a right we owe everyone rather than a perk the wealthiest schools extend when it happens to serve them.

For decades, cost blocked the way into elite education. Cost is now, for some students at some schools, disappearing. What remains are the older and more stubborn barriers: information, preparation, confidence, and a system that generations built to keep certain people out, one that has never fully stopped. Free tuition is a door. Someone still has to tell these students the door exists, and hold it open long enough for them to walk through.

Further reading

If you want to go deeper, start with Hoxby and Avery’s The Missing “One-Offs” and Hoxby and Turner’s What High-Achieving, Low-Income Students Know about College. For data on which colleges actually move students up the income ladder, Opportunity Insights has the best social-mobility research in the country. Ron Lieber’s book The Price You Pay for College is the clearest explanation of how financial aid really works, and Paul Tough’s The Years That Matter Most follows real students through the admissions gauntlet. On the demographic pressures driving all of this, Nathan Grawe’s The Agile College lays out the enrollment cliff and what it means for who gets educated and where.

Find me on Bluesky if you want to talk about this.