Students across Colorado are now receiving their financial aid awards for next year. It’s happening later than usual because of the revamping of the federal FAFSA forms — and students and families have been anxious to learn what kind of support they’ll have in paying next year’s college costs.
Most students in the U.S. receive financial aid to attend college: grants, loans, scholarships, work-study and more. That’s true of our Colorado State University campuses: 60% of undergraduates at CSU Fort Collins receive aid; 70% at CSU Pueblo; and 30% at CSU Global. And since 2011, our flagship campus in Fort Collins has covered the full amount of tuition and fees for our lowest-income Colorado students. CSU Pueblo has a similar plan. CSU Global held tuition steady without an increase for over a decade.
We worry a lot about keeping education affordable for Colorado students. And we also know, from a considerable amount of research, that most people in Colorado think college costs more than it does.
Every couple of years, CSU works with a research team out of Broomfield, Magellan Strategies, to survey Coloradans on their perceptions of higher education, including cost. This data helps us keep our pulse on the concerns of the taxpayers who fund our campuses, as well as families and students who may be looking at college as an option.
While CSU continues to earn strong marks for the quality of education and the value of its degrees, there are other, more concerning trends. The most disturbing and the hardest to debunk are the persistent misperceptions around the cost of a degree.
In our latest survey, we asked respondents to rank the importance of various attributes of a college or university. “Affordable tuition” was at the top of the list.
But when asked to guess the annual tuition rates at CSU, only 27% of respondents got it right at $15,000 or less (average tuition and fees for full-time Colorado undergraduates was $12,896 at CSU Fort Collins in 2023-24). Almost 60% of those we asked thought the cost would be anywhere from $15,000 a year to more than $40,000 a year.
This misunderstanding about the cost of education also translates into heightened concerns about student debt. Of those we interviewed, 54% imagined that in-state students graduating from CSU would carry an average debt of more than $30,000. In reality, nearly half of CSU graduates leave the university with no loan debt at all. Of those who do, the average debt is well below $30K and below the national average — debt loads for Colorado graduates have been steadily declining since 2014.
It’s also well-documented that most college graduates will recoup their investment in their education many times over through their increased earnings over a lifetime.
Of course, students also have to pay for their housing, dining and travel expenses on top of tuition and fees. And some programs are more expensive than others. But those costs are reflected in the debt levels at graduation, and as the numbers show, average student debt for Colorado students remains reasonable and below national peers.
I’ve talked about these issues on a daily basis since roughly 2008, probably putting an awful lot of people to sleep in service clubs and church meeting halls around Colorado. And obviously I haven’t made much of a dent in the public perception.
People continue to think college is more expensive, less accessible and more of a burden over a lifetime than it actually is. And these misunderstandings will deter some talented people from pursuing an education that could significantly improve their lifelong financial and career situations.
With the University of Colorado, we tried a third party-designed social media campaign last year. We didn’t move the needle much. In fact, over time, we know a lot about what hasn’t worked to dispel these misperceptions.
And while as a career scientist, I can argue that a well-designed experiment provides new information even with a “negative” outcome, I also recall my Little League coach telling us that at some point we needed to score some runs to win the game. I’m afraid we haven’t been scoring many runs in the area of perception.
I ask you to consider these questions: How do we counter the prevailing and false narrative around the cost of public higher education? How do we help more students see college as a possibility? How do we ensure that more students know there is a financial aid award with their name on it that can help make the cost more manageable than they might have imagined?
I welcome your thoughts.
Tony Frank is the chancellor of the Colorado State University System. He can be reached at chancellor_tony_frank@Mail.Colostate.edu.
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