Tuition at many CCs is about $1500/semester. For low-income families, the Pell Grant is enough to cover full tuition, books, any fees and still have a couple thousand left over in the form of a refund check the student can use for incidentals. If the student lives at home there is no R&B that would be higher than what it was when the student was in high school, meaning the family does not have to increase their budget to accommodate an additional expense.
For many low-income families, there is no affordable option besides CC. Sometimes, even sending a student 300 miles away for full-ride college because the travel expense (2 or 3 times a year) is too much.
We can’t assume that any university will cover a Full Ride (tuition+R&B+fees) as well as guarantee the funds to cover books, travel, and other costs associated with attending college. Also, most FinAid packages include the GSL loans for low-income students. For families accustomed to low credit scores because of small debt that became unpayable and who may have never had an auto loan at all or over $3K-$5K, the idea of taking out a GSLs totaling $27K over four years can seem an incredible burden to place on their child.
Considering all that, and knowing their student can attend CC for no oop cost, no loans, and with a couple thousand dollars coming back every year can make for an easy decision.
Oops, i responded before seeing that you had already responded.
Exactly. I know families that would never consider any non-life essential expenditure over $400. Heck, some can’t pay that much when their health actually depends on it. The idea of spending $1000 at one time on anything simply isn’t given the slightest thought. It’s as impossible to consider as flapping their arms and taking flight.
I tried to help one boy from a family like this a year ago. He was desperate to attend college, but knew his mother could not afford to give him even $10 to buy school paper, much less $100 for gas to drive him to the other side of the state. Families in this dire a financial situation aren’t rare. In the end, that young man ended up starting work at a dead-end job. In his opinion, even if he got some miraculous FinAid offer that cost his mother zero, life experiences had taught him something would happen to necessitate him dropping out for some financial reason. His entire life was merely weeks-long or (if the family was lucky) months-long intervals between the next potentially life-changing financial crisis. So he forgot about his dream of college.