Free-Tuition Experiment Exposes Risks for Low-Income Students

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Elizabeth Lindamood’s Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays are for Food City, the supermarket in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where she manages cashiers and baggers and assists customers. The rest of the week is for classes at a campus of Roane State Community College 2 miles away, where the 18-year-old is studying to become an elementary school teacher—plus a couple more Food City shifts.

Lindamood’s tuition is paid by the state’s Tennessee Promise program, but constant pressure and late nights have made her consider quitting more than once. “There’s been quite a few times where I’ve just been sitting there with my boyfriend and I just break out in tears,” she says. “I’m just so stressed. I don’t know what to do.”

Democratic presidential candidates, including Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, have presented an array of tuition-free and debt-free college proposals. Tennessee’s pioneering program shows that achieving the ambitious goal of educational equity is daunting.

The state became the first in the U.S. to offer tuition-free community or technical college for every graduating high school senior when the program was signed into law in 2014. A complementary program for adults, Tennessee Reconnect, followed. Results so far are encouraging: The state’s college-going rate of high school graduates rose to 64% in 2015, the first year of implementation, from 58.1% the year before. There’s also visible improvement in dropout rates. And because almost half of Promise students received a federal Pell Grant, the total cost of the program from 2015 to 2018 was a relatively modest $68.5 million.

Yet the fact remains that low-income students on the path to a diploma are easily derailed by things besides the cost of tuition, which is about $2,000 a semester at Roane State. Expensive textbooks, car repairs, and 40-hour-a-week jobs get in the way of the required full class load. “There are just inherently complex social and emotional factors that a financial aid program doesn’t address,” says Mike Krause, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission & Student Assistance Corp., which administers the program.

About four-fifths of high school seniors in the state apply for the program each year, though only a fraction ultimately sign up. Among the first batch of Promise students, the roughly 16,200 who started college in fall 2015, about 18% dropped out after one semester. After three years, about 49% had quit, compared with about 55% for students enrolling in fall 2014, before the program was implemented.

While Democrats have made free tuition a rallying cry in the 2020 election, Republican-controlled Tennessee seized on it years ago. In 2013 then-Governor Bill Haslam announced the Drive to 55, with the goal of increasing the proportion of Tennesseans with postsecondary education to 55% by 2025, from about 38% of working-age adults that year. Promise is what policymakers call a “last-dollar” program, meaning it pays the cost of tuition not covered by federal Pell Grants or state awards and scholarships. The program doesn’t cover expenses associated with being a student such as transportation, child care, school materials, and other costs. Funds can be used at the state’s community and technical colleges, as well as universities with eligible programs. Support is capped at five semesters.

Tennessee Promise is a higher education initiative that began as an economic development initiative, Krause says. In consultations with employers across the state, the No. 1 concern was the ability to recruit qualified workers, he says, and “those skills were not coming from a high school diploma.”

The Promise and Reconnect programs were intended to fill that gap while also building a pipeline that would lure employers to the state. In an increasingly high-skill economy, “ultimately, the states who were going to win were going to be the states that had the better-trained workforce,” says Haslam, whose second term as governor ended in January.

Not only do students with an associate’s degree earn more on average than those with just a high school diploma, they’re also less likely to be unemployed. Tennessee’s jobless rate is half what it was in early 2014, and the median household income has surged almost 30%.

By several metrics, Tennessee Promise is a success. The program’s existence—and the heavy promotion it gets from high school teachers and counselors—prompts many students to consider higher education. The number of applicants has risen each year since its inception, with 69,305 students enrolled in an eligible institution from 2015 to 2018. Almost 23% of Promise students enrolled in community college in the fall of 2016 graduated in five semesters or less, compared with about 14% of the pre-Promise 2014 group.

Free tuition has “done a great, huge job, but it’s not a magic wand,” says Terri Bryson, a vice president at Motlow State Community College, which has graduated 1,566 Promise students. Promise students are paired with volunteer mentors who do everything from helping fill out the labyrinthine Free Application for Federal Student Aid to sending reminder texts about community service requirements to supporting students when their grade-point averages drop near the 2.0 minimum.

Janice Goldthreate, a manager at Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. in Memphis who’s been a Promise mentor since 2016, says students get worn down. “I look at the younger people, and they’re physically exhausted,” she says. “They’re trying to work because they do feel pressure to contribute to their family household, or maybe working is nonnegotiable for them.”

Lindamood grew up on the outskirts of Knoxville, home to the state’s flagship university, but couldn’t afford a four-year university. Her mother didn’t go to college; her father did, but not right after high school. She feels lucky compared with many of her Promise peers because she qualified for a scholarship from a teacher’s foundation that covers books. But working as many as 36 hours a week means having to stay up until 4 a.m. to finish homework. Skipping a shift means not having enough to pay the bills—or getting fired. A slip in grades could mean the loss of the Promise grant. “I have a lot to do and not enough time to do it,” Lindamood says with a chuckle as she folds laundry after a recent class.

A total of 13 states have enacted statewide college promise programs, according to the Campaign for Free College Tuition. Celeste Carruthers, a University of Tennessee associate professor who’s studied Tennessee Promise, says that while there are broad similarities, each is tailored to its place. “They seem to be different in ways that are important to those contexts, those states,” she says.

New York’s program, the Excelsior Scholarship, requires college graduates to remain in the state for as many years as they received aid, in part to counteract brain drain. New York lost more residents than any other state in 2018, year-over-year.

David Deming, director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard, is skeptical that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to improving access to higher education. “To me, the solution is really that the federal government provides the money and then a very basic framework that gives states flexibility to enact programs that work best for their populations,” he says.

As for Lindamood, she plans to put her first two years of community college toward a bachelor’s degree. When she’s overwhelmed, she sometimes retreats to her grandparents’ house to spend time with Zoey, the terrier mutt she’s had for almost a decade. Her desire to teach helps her power through exhaustion. “I don’t want to be working at a grocery store for the rest of my life,” she says. “I won’t get my dream job—what I’m passionate about—if I don’t finish my degree.”

Student Aid: A summary of the education proposals of Democratic front-runners

Bernie Sanders
Abolish tuition and fees at four-year public universities, community colleges, and trade schools. Cancel $1.6 trillion in student debt and expand Pell Grants to cover expenses beyond tuition.

Elizabeth Warren
Free tuition and no fees at two- and four-year public colleges, plus forgiveness of as much as $50,000 in student debt for 42 million Americans.

Pete Buttigieg
Free tuition at public schools for 80% of American families. Expand the Pell Grant program and create a $1 billion community college fund to pay for ancillary costs of college, such as child care and transportation.

Joe Biden
Two years of tuition-free community college or high-quality training for recent high school graduates and many adults. The “first-dollar” program means students can use Pell Grants and other aid toward expenses beyond tuition.

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