| Summary: | Free college proposals have become increasingly popular in many countries. To evaluate their potential effects, this paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of college enrollment, performance, and graduation. A central piece of the model, student effort has a direct effect on class completion and an indirect effect in mitigating the risk of not completing a class or not remaining in college. The model is estimated with rich, student-level administrative data from Colombia, and the estimates are used to simulate free college programs that differ in eligibility requirements. Among these, universal free college expands enrollment the most, but it does not affect graduation rates and has the highest per-graduate cost. Performance-based free college, in contrast, delivers a slightly lower enrollment expansion yet a greater graduation rate at a lower per-graduate cost. Relative to universal free college, performance-based free college places greater risk on students, but precisely for this reason leads them to better outcomes. Nonetheless, even performance-based free college fails to deliver a large increase in the graduation rate, suggesting that additional, complementary policies might be required to elicit the large increase in effort that is needed to raise graduation rates
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