Thirty-seven percent of students who initially entered college through the Promise Scholarship Program earned a two-year college degree within three years, compared to just 11 percent of students who applied for the scholarship but never fulfilled its requirements, such as financial aid paperwork and service hours.* Tennessee expects that since its inception, the scholarship program will have produced a total of 50,000 college graduates by 2025, officials told me in an interview.
Before the free tuition program went statewide, only 16 percent of Tennessee students who started college in 2011 had earned a degree after three years. Graduation rates then rose to 22% for students who started community colleges in 2014. At this time, 27 counties in Tennessee have launched their own free tuition programs, but the statewide policy has not yet taken effect.
By 2020, when five-year tuition was introduced statewide, 28 percent of Tennessee community college students earned a three-year college degree. Not all of these students participated in the free education program, but many of them did.
It is not clear whether the free tuition program is the driving force behind the high graduation rates. It is possible that motivated students will sign up for it, abide by the rules of the scholarship program, and perhaps graduate in greater numbers without it. It’s also possible that unrelated state-level reforms, from increases in federal financial aid to academic advising, helped more students reach the finish line.
I spoke with Celeste Carruthers, an economist at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, who has been studying a free tuition program in her state. She’s currently crunching the numbers to see if the program is causing graduation rates to rise, but the signs she’s seeing now give her “reason for optimism.” Using US Census data, she compared Tennessee’s college attainment rates with the rest of the United States. In the years immediately following the statewide scholarship program, starting with the high school class of 2015, there was an astonishing jump in the proportion of young people earning college degrees a few years later, while educational attainment elsewhere in the country improved only slightly. Tennessee quickly went from being a laggard in young adult college attainment to a leader — at least until the pandemic hit. (See chart.)
Although there will likely be ongoing evaluation of the Tennessee program, researchers and program officials point to three lessons learned so far:
- The scholarship program did not help many low-income students financially. The federal Pell Grant of $7,395 far exceeds annual tuition and fees at Tennessee community colleges, which are about $4,500 for a full-time student. Community college was already free for low-income students, who represent nearly half of the students in Tennessee’s free college program. Like other free college programs across the country, Tennessee’s program is designed as a “last dollar” program, meaning it pays only after other forms of financial aid have been exhausted.
This means that tuition subsidies went primarily to students from high-income families who are not eligible for the Pell Grant. In Tennessee, the funding source is the state lottery. Nearly $22 million in lottery proceeds were used to pay community college tuition in the last year.
- Free education alone is not enough to help. In 2018, Tennessee added coaching and mentoring for low-income students to give them additional support. (Low-income students did not receive any financial aid because other financial aid sources already covered their tuition.) Then, in 2022, Tennessee added emergency grants for books and other living expenses for students in need — up to $1,000 per student per semester. .* Additional assistance for low-income students is funded through state budget allocations and private fundraising. For students who are the first generation in their families to attend college, current graduation rates jumped to 34% with this additional support compared to 11% without it, the 10-year report said.
“The combination of financial support and non-financial support — that mentoring support, that coaching support — is really the perfect fit,” said Graham Thomas, chief community and government relations officer at tnAchieves. “It’s a game-changer, and that’s often overlooked in terms of the financial part.”
Training is best done in person on campus. During the coronavirus crisis, Tennessee launched an online mentoring platform, but students didn’t engage with it. “We’ve learned the lesson that meeting in person is the most valuable method when building relationships,” said Ben Sterling, chief content officer at tnAchieves.
- The worst case scenario did not happen. When free community colleges were first announced, critics worried that zero tuition would lure students away from four-year colleges, which are not free. This is bad because the process of transferring from a community college to a four-year school can be difficult as students lose credits and time invested. Studies have shown that most students are more likely to complete a four-year degree if they start at a four-year institution. But the number of bachelor’s degrees has not decreased. It seems possible that the free tuition policy attracted students who would not have gone to college at all in the past, without breaking up four-year colleges. However, bachelor’s degree attainment in Tennessee, although high, is still far lower than the rest of the country. (See chart.)
In addition, students can also use Tennessee Promise Scholarship funds at a limited number of public four-year colleges that offer associate degrees. About 10 percent of the program’s students take advantage of this option.
Despite all the positive signs of educational achievement in Tennessee, recent years have not been good. “Everything that has happened to enrollment since the coronavirus has erased all the gains that the Tennessee Promise had,” said the University of Tennessee’s Carruthers. The combination of pandemic disruptions, a strong job market, and changing public sentiment about higher education has led to declines in community college enrollment nationwide. Students are starting to come back in Tennessee, but community college enrollment is still lower than it was in 2019.
* Correction and clarifications: Due to incorrect information provided to the Hechinger Report, an earlier version of this story mischaracterized the two groups of students who succeeded in earning a college degree within three years. This story has also been amended to clarify that the training was only offered in 2018. A separate mentoring service already exists. Additionally, the $1,000 emergency grants, which began in 2022, are not one-time grants but can be issued multiple times.