Massachusetts operates 15 community colleges all across the state, which now offer students — some 137,000 of them — free tuition and fees.
But that’s apparently not enough for House lawmakers. They’ve proposed to give the same educational free ride to students at Quincy College, which is not among the state’s community colleges. It is instead a municipally affiliated school with its own board, its own ambitious expansion plans, and none of a state institution’s fiscal guardrails.
With full-time tuition in the $9,000 a year range for its 3,500 students on two campuses (a satellite campus operates in Plymouth), the cost to state taxpayers could easily tally more than $30 million a year.
The proposal has not been the subject of a public hearing or debate on the House floor and carries no official cost estimate. But when the House released its version of the governor’s proposed higher education bond bill, there it was — a bit of added policy hocus-pocus benefiting a school that has long been championed by House Speaker Ron Mariano, a Quincy native.
“The House bill recognizes the key role minority serving institutions and Quincy College play in expanding access to higher education and economic opportunity,” Mariano said in a statement issued to the editorial board. “Ensuring that students at those institutions have the same access to educational opportunities as their [state community] college peers isn’t a drain on public resources. It’s an investment in the students who rely on these institutions to build better futures for themselves and their families.”
But it now stands as a giant stumbling block between the Senate, which scrapped the provision in its version, and House negotiators trying to reach a compromise on an essential piece of legislation aimed at providing more than $3 billion in bonding authority to deal with the state’s crumbling higher education infrastructure. Even that $3-plus billion represents only a partial payment toward systemwide deferred maintenance — and fixes for such items as the Mass College of Art and Design Tower that partially collapsed in 2023.
Governor Maura Healey filed her version of the bill in January of 2025. The House took more than nine months to approve its bill, the Senate finalized its version in February, and since April the legislation has remained stuck in conference committee — the provision to offer free tuition at Quincy College and three other private, nonprofit colleges federally designated as “minority serving institutions” among the sticking points.
The free tuition programs at the state’s own community colleges are not inexpensive. Last year the primary free community college program was budgeted at $96 million. Another $24 million was allocated for MassReconnect, started a year earlier and aimed at those over the age of 25. Not surprisingly, community college enrollment has increased 43.5 percent since fall 2022, before the programs began.
Nine of the state’s community colleges are on the MSI list, but the House also wants to offer a free ride to students at three other private community colleges on that list: Urban College of Boston (tuition $11,000 a year; 1,600 students); Cambridge College, now merged with Bay Path University (tuition around $15,000; about 1,800 students); and Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology ($19,000 a year tuition; 1,095 students).
Nothing in the legislation indicates to what extent the state should subsidize those existing tuitions. It simply gives the Department of Higher Education the task of creating regulations to implement the arrangement.
Quincy College is not on the MSI list, although Mariano’s office said that many of its students come from low-income and multicultural backgrounds.
However, its students are already being heavily subsidized thanks to House lawmakers. A line item in the 2027 state budget allocates $1.5 million in targeted scholarships for students pursuing either an associate degree or a certificate program “at a municipal college.” In fact, Quincy College is the only municipal college in the state and among the last in the country. It also benefits from the occasional earmark as it did in both 2024 and 2025 supplementary budget bills, receiving $300,000 each year “for student supports and services.”
The former Quincy Junior College has had a spotty financial history, as it acknowledged in its own strategic plan, but said that in the past five years it “has transformed from a tuition-dependent institution facing significant financial and enrollment challenges into a dynamic and forward-looking” institution. It also acknowledged that expanded free community college initiatives at similar state schools “influence the environment in which Quincy College operates” — it’s harder to attract tuition-paying students when comparable programs are free.
Well, if Quincy College wants the benefits of that expanded tuition-free network, it could do it the right way and ask to be considered as a possible 16th state community college.
Meanwhile that legislative sleight of hand — and the untallied costs it would entail — continue to hold up a piece of legislation that is critical to students at the state’s public colleges and universities. Giving those students a safe and updated learning environment ought to be the top priority of the state’s lawmakers — not politically motivated giveaways.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.