A bipartisan bill making its way through the Colorado legislature would prohibit state financial aid from going to private and for-profit colleges, the latest version of the proposed legislation shows. The bill – formally known as HB26-1345 – would also prohibit state work-study programs at private and for-profit institutions. Lawmakers were considering changes to the bill during a marathon session Tuesday.
Leaders of private colleges are speaking out against the bill, saying it will negatively affect Colorado’s neediest students. “It absolutely impacts students just based on school choice alone,” Catherine Rhode, the Associate VP of Admissions and Financial Aid at Regis University, a private nonprofit institution serving about 2,600 students in Denver, told Denver7.
The proposal to cut off financial aid to private and for-profit colleges – part of a “last-minute” amendment – would affect more than 2,000 students and reduce funding by $14 million, according to Denver7.
Colorado Christian University, a private, nonprofit institution serving over 17,000 students, would be one of the universities impacted by the proposal.
The bigger picture:
The Colorado effort to cut off aid to private and for-profit colleges comes at a time when funding for higher education is increasingly constrained. As reported by The EDU Ledger, although full-time college enrollment increased by 3.6% in 2025, funding on a per-student basis dropped 1%, marking the first decrease in per-student funding since 2012.
Aside from questions of fairness, can steering limited state resources away from students who attend private colleges make a difference for public institutions or the state budget? Support for independent institutions is “generally one of the smallest allocations of state and local funding,” according to the 2025 state higher education finance report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
The report says 45 states provided funding to independent institutions in 2025, and the amounts ranged from 0.005% in New Mexico to 12.0% in Pennsylvania. “In most states, funding for independent institutions was predominantly allocated to student financial aid rather than institutional operating appropriations,” the report states.
Some policy analysts have suggested that private, non-profit colleges deserve support because they can help boost educational attainment. For instance, in a 2017, higher education policy expert Matthew Chingos suggested that while for-profit colleges face ongoing scrutiny because of their “troubling track record,” that the private, non-profit sector “plays an important role and may be in a position to contribute even more to the nation’s educational attainment and economic mobility.”
