Since our community is increasingly interested and concerned about the rising cost of college level education, we thought it would be a great idea to dig up more information on Universities that offer No Loans, Free college schooling for our students. And guess what, we found 72 OF THEM FOR YOU!

These programs are often called “free tuition” programs for low income students, but many of them offer much more than just free tuition, not that this is a bad thing. In the age of rising educational cost, shrinking wages, disappearing unskilled jobs, the opportunities in the future are looking bleak for our young people. Hopefully, a few of these programs can help you out.

Most of these programs are aimed at low income families as defined by being in the bottom of the quintile in family income per year. These incomes come out to about $40,000 a year, but you will find with a little research that programs such as Harvard’s Financial Aid Initiative, we discussed in a previous article, has drastically reduced programs for people up to the $150,000 per year range.

You must do your homework to find all these great opportunities, but it is worth it. For example, in the Harvard FAI program, we discovered a family making $100,000 per year will only pay $8,000/yr, including room and board. (Click for more information)

Types of No-Loans Policies

The policies fall into four main types:

• No loans. These policies eliminate loans from the financial aid package of low income students. In Princeton’s case, the loans are eliminated from the aid packages of all students, not just low income students. Other schools with no loan policies for low income students include Rice University, UNC Chapel Hill, University of Virginia, and the University of Pennsylvania.
• Loan caps. These policies institute a low cap on student loans for low-income students. Examples of schools with such policies include Brown University.
[ADSENSE2]
• No parental contribution. These policies eliminate the parental contribution, but retain the student contribution along with the standard self-help level. So these policies may still require some loans in the aid package, albeit a reduced amount. Examples of schools with such policies include Yale and Stanford.
• Pell grant match. These policies match the student’s Federal Pell Grant. This significantly reduces but does not eliminate the self-help level. Examples of schools with such policies include MIT and previously included the University of Minnesota system.

Believe it or not, Princeton was the first University to kick off these sort of programs as an outreach effort to bring in more low income students with their no loans financial aid packages in 1998-1999. As a result, they were able to double their number of low income University attendees from that point until 2005-2006. This is about the time Harvard got into the mix with their programs have had similar success bridging the gap.

Understand, the programs listed below are not as phenominal as the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative we discovered, but they are definitely worth the extra effort to do some additional research or make a phone call. Call these institutions and speak with the financial aid departments. I think you will find them more than helpful and reasonable to assist you in this time of need. We found them to be so.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LIST OF 72 SCHOOLS

Source: http://www.finaid.org/questions/noloansforlowincome.phtml