Free community college programs are often promoted as a way to expand access to higher education and to reduce student debt for those who attend. But the programs may have unintended consequences, such as diverting capable students from pursuing four-year degrees or wasting the time of unprepared students in school when they could otherwise be gainfully employed—not to mention that someone has to pay. A recent working paper examines one such program in Chicago and offers some concrete lessons.
The Star Scholarship was established in 2014 and allows all Chicago Public Schools (CPS) graduates with a high school GPA of 3.0 or higher to attend any campus of the City Colleges of Chicago tuition-free. CCC campuses offer two-year degree programs. The only other requirement is to fill out a FAFSA application. Scholarships are renewable annually for three years after graduation. To remain eligible, students must maintain a 2.0 GPA and continue to fill out a FAFSA app each year. Star Scholarships provide last-dollar funds, covering all remaining tuition after federal and state aid is applied.
A quartet of researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin, primarily analyzes all CPS students who graduated between 2015 and 2020. But they also examine changes in student outcomes before and after the policy was implemented, with data from all students who graduated from CPS between 2011 and 2014. They employ a regression discontinuity design, comparing students who were just above and just below the scholarship’s GPA eligibility threshold within the same high school and graduation year. Presumably the only real difference between the groups is whether they received the scholarship. They access data from CPS, the National Student Clearinghouse, community colleges and universities, and IPEDS, which incorporates data about student aid and can be used to analyze postsecondary outcomes.
The topline finding: Eligibility for the Star Scholarship does not affect overall college enrollment for students near the eligibility cutoff, but it does shift where students enroll. This makes sense because the GPA requirement is high enough that most of these students are deciding between a two-year or a four-year college, rather than deciding whether to enroll in college at all. Specifically, eligible students are 4.2 percentage points more likely to first enroll in one of Chicago’s community colleges and 2.9 percentage points less likely to begin at a four-year university. They estimate that approximately 20 percent of eligible Star Scholars would have attended a four-year university had they not been eligible for the scholarship. Still, although they see a 2.1 percentage point increase in associate degree attainment three years after high school, they find no evidence that eligibility for the scholarship decreases the chances that students earn a bachelor’s degree—that is, students are not substituting an associate degree for a bachelor’s. Double good news.
But are students choosing lower-quality institutions? The researchers look into the difference in quality between colleges and find that, although the scholarship slightly decreases the instructional spending of the first college a student attends, it doesn’t reduce other college “quality” indicators, such as completion rates or median earnings. Access to tuition-free community college also does not decrease the probability of students earning a STEM degree (i.e., majors with higher-paying jobs), but it does increase the number of students obtaining four-year degrees in health and human services.
Finally, they find no statistical differences in college enrollment and degree completion between students by household income or immigrant background. However, both lower-income students and students in English-as-second-language households are less likely to first enroll in a four-year university as a result of scholarship eligibility.
The authors say that the encouraging results of the Star Scholarship may stem from it boosting the college-going culture within eligible high schools and increasing the academic confidence of students at the GPA margin. But the fairly high GPA requirement is likely the biggest driver. Lower expectations would surely result in more negative impacts and unintended consequences, as other such programs have shown.
And with grade inflation off the charts, one has to wonder whether guaranteeing free college tuition to the top 10 percent of each graduating class would be a better merit-based policy than relying on GPA.
SOURCE: Emileigh Harrison et al., “The Effect of Merit-Based Free Community College,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (March 2026).
