“If they would tether aid to the student, and allow the student and the student’s family to choose where to go, they would come a long way to accessibility,” said Gary Olson, president of Daemen College, a liberal arts college with more than 2,500 students in Amherst, New York. “They wouldn’t have half of their higher education system in the U.S. collapse.”

Private Schools Struggle
To help rein in the country’s $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, Warren said she wants to create “universal free public college” by taxing households with a net worth of $50 million or more. “We must ensure that we never have another student debt crisis again,” she said in her proposal. “We can do that by recognizing that a public college education is like a public K-12 education — a basic public good that should be available to everyone with free tuition and zero debt at graduation.”

Sanders says if elected he’ll seek to enact a law providing at least $48 billion per year to eliminate tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and community colleges by taxing stock, bonds and derivative trades. He’s proposed similar legislation in Congress, the College for All Act.

Such programs are unlikely to cause much harm to elite universities like Yale University, which is armed with a $29.4 billion endowment. But the finances of small, private colleges are more precarious as they tend to have few revenue sources besides tuition. The median enrollment at public universities rose 9% in the last five years at such universities rated by S&P Global Ratings, while enrollment was flat at private schools, according to the company. Some private schools have shuttered completely or struggled to stay open.

States Step Up
In an analysis of 15 states’ free college programs, the Education Trust found that most of them don’t provide support for four years of college, according to a 2018 report by the group that advocates for low-income and minority students. More states will likely enact such policies, regardless of who wins in 2020, as a way to encourage students to attend college, said Tiffany Jones, the organization’s director of higher education policy.

Campuses have stepped up affordability efforts too. The University of Texas at Austin, which has more than 51,000 students, on July 9 said it would cover tuition and fees for students whose families make as much as $65,000 per year. That’s an estimated 8,600 students per year. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this fall will cover tuition and fees for state residents whose families have an income of $61,000 or less.

That could pressure Indiana’s DePauw University: the liberal arts college recruits students from the neighboring state. The proposals for nationwide free public college also remain a threat, said Robert Andrews, vice president for enrollment management.

“Obviously, it puts institutions like DePauw and thousands of other private schools in a dangerous situation for our long-term viability,” he said.

Return on Investment
Private college leaders argue that lower- and middle-income students rarely pay the listed price of attendance. Tuition discounting, or the amount of tuition revenue offset by institutions’ grants and forms of aid, reached a record level in the 2018-19 year, according to a study of more than 400 private colleges by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. And private, not-for-profit institutions offer other advantages, such as smaller class sizes. They have a higher six-year graduation rate than public universities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The debate over free college nationwide may be a wake-up call for private colleges, leading to affordability efforts or new programs. That’s what happened in New York: Siena College, a liberal arts college in Loudonville, started a program this year that guarantees $52,000 in scholarship money to both in-state and out-of-state students. If students don’t graduate in four years, Siena will pay the rest.