Some good colleges still keep tuition low. Give their students higher Pell Grants

President-elect Joe Biden’s higher-education agenda is ambitious. When elements of his plan come before Congress, they will inevitably run into competition from other needs: covid-19 stimulus, infrastructure spending, health care and much more.

So here’s a scaled-down proposal — one that could make higher education more affordable to students, strengthen a particularly admirable group of colleges and reduce future student debt.

In this era of $70,000 prices for tuition, room and board at elite colleges, the United States still has an array of colleges that cost much, much less. There are very-low-cost colleges where a student can get a degree for an eighth the price of an Ivy League college. Many are excellent.

An example is the City University of New York, CUNY. Its 11 four-year campuses still charge tuition just under $7,000 per year, plus a few hundred dollars in fees. This is an amazing bargain, and in 2017 a study led by economics professor Raj Chetty, then at Stanford, found that six CUNY campuses were among the top 10 colleges nationwide in moving students higher in lifetime income.

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