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As soaring tuition scares off many families, a growing number of private colleges have embraced a marketing tactic associated more with selling airline tickets or flat-screen televisions than higher education: a price cut.

St. John’s College slashed tuition from $52,734 in this school year to $35,000 in the next.

The liberal arts school, with campuses in Maryland and New Mexico, joined more than 20 others nationwide that have reduced prices in the past three years.

A push for college financial aid to cover more than tuition

The agency that runs Cal Grant, California’s biggest financial aid program for students at public colleges, want the legislature to expand the program to cover rent, food, transportation and other non-tuition expenses. That could cost as much as $2 billion a year.

Carrying his coffee, 18-year-old Joseph Franco headed out his front door and walked to the convenience store near his Oakland apartment. He needed change for the bus.

“I’m a youth, so it’s $1.15,” he said before stepping onto the nearly empty 54. He went straight to the back row and sat down. When the bus stopped at the Fruitvale BART station, Franco stood up, adjusted his hat and thanked the driver. He was headed to a job interview at a burrito restaurant in Dublin, California.

Six Senate Democrats urged U.S. News & World Report on Monday to overhaul how it ranks colleges by giving more credit to those that do the most for underrepresented and disadvantaged students “instead of the privileged few.”

As a high school senior, Arezo Amerzada’s choices for college came down to University of California-Riverside, several California State University campuses and a handful of out-of-state schools, including the University of Nevada in Reno.

That was when Amerzada, who grew up in Union City in the San Francisco Bay Area, learned about the Western Undergraduate Exchange. The increasingly popular program gives California students steep tuition discounts at dozens of colleges and universities in nearby states. The University of Nevada was one of them.

In 2011 the sociologist Richard Arum bemoaned the lack of rigor in American higher education.

In 2016 he critiqued the “inadequate and wrongheaded approaches,” especially those focusing on labor-market data, that drive most studies of student outcomes.

This year’s list of Rhodes Scholars is remarkable for many reasons. Almost two-thirds of the recipients are women and nearly half are first-generation Americans or immigrants. But one scholarship winner in particular made history this year.

The prospect of a tuition-free community college education is finally here.

Hudson County Community College has been named one of 13 community colleges in the state to participate in the pilot Community College Opportunity Grant program, through which tuition and fees for students with an adjusted gross income of $45,000 or less can take six or more credits free of charge next semester.

Officials in Tennessee set aside $350 million to make community college free for that entire state With his $1.8 billion gift (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/opinion/bloomberg-college-donation-financial-aid.html) to Johns Hopkins University, Michael Bloomberg made the largest donation in history to a higher education institution and certainly the most high-profile gift directed towards scholarships in recent memory.

Still, the staggering sum is likely to only make a small dent in America’s college affordability problem.