The government isn’t doing enough to provide access to college, it seems—even though a new report from the Urban Institute shows that families earning less than $30,000 can send their children to college for free.

The message of the report by Sandy Baum and Sarah Minton is that money is available for low-income students, but they need to be informed about it. Baum and Minton first report statistics underscoring the federal largess (from the 2011-2012 academic year):

  • Ninety percent of students whose families earn less than $40,000 receive, on average, more than $11,000 in grants.
  • Families earning less than $30,000 can receive enough money to cover tuition and fees at a four-year public college, with some money left over.
  • Fifty-nine percent of all students receive grants.
  • Seventy percent of all students enrolled full-time receive grants.

But many potential college students don’t know that such funding is available. “Lack of awareness of financial aid, limited understanding of the system, and the tendency to overestimate the price of college are well documented,” write Baum and Minton. Thus, they recommend that families be made aware of the availability of funds when their children are in middle school.

There’s a relentless logic to this report. Money is available for low-income students; but low-income high schoolers didn’t know that when they were younger, so they didn’t take the right courses or they didn’t study enough. So it’s the responsibility of the government to inform them.

The authors identify three points at which the federal government could spread the message about college availability: when families obtain food stamps; when they use Medicaid; and when they meet with tax preparers to file income taxes (especially those who are obtaining the earned income tax credit).

Much of the paper is devoted to exploring how this “integration of financial aid information into public systems in which low-income families participate” might work. The authors observe euphemistically that “there is likely not a low-cost option.”

Hat-tip to the Hechinger Report (writing in U.S. News) for reporting on this study.