New Mexico to offer free college tuition to all state residents

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From the Forbes article:

The plan is estimated to cover as many as 55,000 students and cost between $25 and $35 million per year, a modest price tag that reflects the relatively low in-state tuition…

Those numbers sound fishy. Even at $35 million, that would only be $630 per student.

But this might suggest an explanation:

As in several other state plans, New Mexico’s tuition coverage would kick in only after already existing state aid and federal Pell grants had been applied. One paradoxical impact of such an approach is that rich students will receive more state assistance than low-income students, many of whom will have much of their costs covered by Pell grants.

Perhaps NM realizes that most of the 2-year students are full Pell, so the real subsidy is more like $5-7.5K for a relatively small cohort of middle- and high-income people. That actually makes good sense, as at the margins it will incentivize better students to remain in state. Tuition at the flagship is around $7500 according to the article, but now free to the presumably higher SES students there…