Ohio State University hopes a new initiative will make attending the state’s flagship university more manageable next year for low- and moderate-income students.

The university announced Tuesday that it will provide financial aid to completely cover tuition and mandatory-fee costs for its neediest students.

The program, which will go into effect on the main campus only with the 2018-2019 school year, will ensure that all in-state students who qualify for Pell grants — federal aid for low-income college students — will receive an aid package from the university that covers any tuition and fees that remain after federal aid, Ohio College Opportunity Grants and other gift aid has been applied.

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Ohio State estimates it will spend more than $11 million each year to help about 3,500 in-state students. The current in-state tuition and mandatory fees on the Columbus campus range from about $10,600 annually for first-year students, who will have their tuition and fees frozen for four years, and $10,000 annually for continuing students.

It's an affordability initiative that university officials said is possible thanks to the Comprehensive Energy Management partnership that Ohio State entered into last school year. The 50-year deal, finalized last spring, earned the university a $1.1 billion upfront payment, plus a three-stage payment of $150 million to support academics. In return, Ohio State pays Ohio State Energy Partners, a private company made up of the French energy company ENGIE and Canadian investment firm Axium Infrastructure, fees starting around $55 million per year.

One part of the agreement was to better manage energy on campus, but there was a second goal, OSU President Dr. Michael V. Drake said Tuesday.

“A second focus of the partnership was to generate resources that we could use to support our faculty, students and staff,” he said. “So this is a large part of the student-support part of that equation.”

It’s the latest step in the university’s effort to make itself more affordable to low- and middle-income families. Drake committed in 2015 to invest $100 million in additional need-based aid for low- and moderate-income students by 2020 through the President’s Affordability Grant program. Since then, that program has provided about $60 million in aid.

“We’ve been working all of these years to create more opportunity by decreasing administrative costs first, and second, the energy partnership and other things, to be able to find the resources to be able to do what we could to make the highest quality possible college education affordable to even more families.”

The university will offer the program to qualifying new, existing and transfer students in the fall of 2018. It will apply only to Columbus-campus students during its first year, but plans to enhance financial aid for Pell students at Ohio State’s regional campuses are in the works.

Ohio State is the first public university in Ohio to offer such a program, university officials said.

Various “free college” programs have been floating around within higher education over the past several years, said Mamie Voight, vice president of policy research at the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill allows its lowest-income students to attend debt-free, using grants, scholarships and work-study programs. Earlier this year, the University of Michigan announced it would cover the full cost of in-state tuition for four years to undergraduates with a family income of less than $65,000.

A positive of Ohio State’s new policy is that it focuses on the neediest students who face enormous cost hurdles to attend college and achieve upward mobility, Voight said.

"For low-income and moderate-income students who are trying to pay those bills ... every dollar really makes a difference in terms of their ability to make ends meet.”

Voight hopes, though, that the program might expand in the future to assist students with other costs, such as living expenses and textbooks.

Ohio State will be working to tweak the program and its estimates over the next year as it learns the makeup of its next incoming class. But university officials wanted Ohio families to know now, as they plan for college applications and future enrollment, that this help might be available to them.

jsmola@dispatch.com

@jennsmola