Rice University announces free tuition for middle income undergraduate students

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Rice University officials announced Tuesday they will provide full tuition scholarships to undergraduate domestic students from low- and middle-income backgrounds starting in the fall of 2019, the latest effort by a major university to respond to rising concerns about soaring higher-education costs and burdensome student debt. The new financial plan, The Rice Investment, will allow full-tuition scholarships and grants to be offered to undergraduate students whose family incomes fall between $65,000 and $130,000 a year and who qualify for need-based financial aid, according to a news release issued Tuesday by the university.

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Students who come from families with an income of $130,000 to $200,000 can also receive scholarships that cover at least half of their tuition. A student whose family makes below $65,000 will be able to receive grant aid that covers their full tuition and mandatory fees, room and board. The financial aid is open to both incoming and continuing students at Rice, the private research university that sits on 300 acres in Houston. “It’s really important to us that all families feel that if their child is admitted to Rice that they can make this work, that they can afford it,” said David Leebron, the university president, in a phone interview Monday. “It’s very clear that over the past decades, that the difference between what a middle-income family feels they can reasonably afford and what a college education costs has grown larger.”

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