“Free” college drives uptick in college admissions in NM, but to what end?

New Mexico’s institutes of higher education are seeing a modest influx in the number of students thanks to “free” college. Whether that is a particularly good thing or not is open to question, but before making a decision you should probably check the charts below out. You can find them at page 5 of this document.

You can see graduation rates for both universities and colleges as well as the fact that the recent uptick in college attendance is relatively small considering the stark decline in student numbers in the 3rd chart (below).

It certainly seems that New Mexico’s community college graduation rates are low, but that is also the case for Northern NM and Highlands Universities. What is New Mexico getting for the billions of dollars that have been invested in higher education?