Joining the ranks of several other public flagship institutions and elite private colleges, the University of Texas has announced a program to guarantee financial aid covering tuition and fees for students who come from low-income families. Eligibility rules vary among the system’s nine academic campuses, but most will offer the guarantee to incoming freshmen from Texas whose families earn less than $25,000 per year. Students also would have to perform well in their courses and graduate on time to benefit from the program, which is expected to be in place by the fall.

Other public flagship institutions that have devised similar plans include Arizona State University, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Virginia.

Elsewhere, the University of Kentucky has announced a program to help low-income students by expanding need-based aid for state residents. The program would provide annual grants of $2,020 to students who are eligible for Pell Grants. The “2020 Scholars” plan, so called because it is part of efforts to make Kentucky a top-20 public research university by 2020, also seeks to increase the number of students who transfer to the university from community and technical colleges. Community-college students who earn an associate degree and carry a grade-point average of at least 3.5 will be able to transfer to the university and continue to pay the tuition rates of their two-year colleges for two years.

Lawmakers in Virginia, meanwhile, are debating a similar proposal to allow qualifying transfer students to pay the same tuition and fees at public four-year institutions that they paid at a community college.