According to university president James Danko’s announcement on Friday, Butler University will become the third college in the United States to join a network that provides a two-year associate degree programme that is free of debt for students who have shown a financial need.
According to Danko, the new programme will enable students to graduate from the institution with a bachelor’s degree for roughly $10,000 after obtaining an associate degree. Butler University’s flat-rate tuition for the 2023–2024 academic year was $44,990, as stated on the school website.”We were established in 1855 by an abolitionist who was adamant that education ought to be accessible to individuals other than the white male population, who was the majority at the time,” Danko stated to CNN.
“We weren’t fulfilling the dreams of our founders… that started a great deal of discussion and debate about how you would impart a degree? What kind of student would that be?
The goal of the new programme is to support low-income, first-generation, and students of colour in their pursuit of a higher education. According to Danko, the university will start accepting applications for the Fall 2025 semester of the two-year programme the following year. He said that donations and endowments would pay for it.Four months have passed since the Supreme Court’s historic ruling, which essentially ended affirmative action in higher education for students of colour by benefiting colleges and universities, which is when Butler’s debt-free programme was announced, as CNN previously reported.
The initiative was developed in collaboration with the Come to Believe Network, a group that offers advising services to conventional four-year colleges such as Butler University that seek to establish cost-effective college curricula.In an effort to make higher education more accessible and inexpensive for all students, The Network has established two identical institutions: Loyola University in Chicago and the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, Minnesota.According to the school’s website, at least 76% of graduates from Loyola’s Arrupe College are anticipated to leave debt-free.
The average out-of-pocket expense for Dougherty Family College at the University of St. Thomas students who are eligible for federal student aid was $2,970 for the 2020–2021 academic year.Carlos Martinez, an Arrupe College alumnus and special projects manager at the Come to Believe Network, claimed that his time in Loyola’s programme gave him a sense of community in addition to a debt-free education.
close conversation
Martinez continued on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University in 2021, and he is presently enrolled in graduate school at George Washington University.
Believe Circle City High School is a public charter school in Indianapolis that serves typically underprivileged kids. Elazia Davison is a senior there. At Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, he was able to complete a comparable dual enrollment programme and graduate debt-free with an associate’s degree.
According to Davison, in order to provide students from underprivileged families with access to higher education, institutions ought to fund more debt-free college programmes.”A lot of stress and trauma responses from not having essentials your entire life might come out when you think about how you’re going to pay for college and how costly it is,” Davison said.”It’s evident that education is crucial when you consider the amount of effort required to gain access to these classes.”
