This fall, thousands of Tennessee college freshmen entered the classroom with the help of state scholarship money. The program, called Tennessee Promise, is designed to boost college graduation rates. WUOT’s Brandon Hollingsworth reports one of its main tools is money to combat spiraling tuition costs.
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It’s the first week of classes at Pellissippi State Community College, in west Knox County. 1,752 of the college’s 2,550 registered freshmen wouldn’t be here without Tennessee Promise. One of them is GabbieAbbatmarco.
"I’ve got a chance to do what I want, and try to get where I want, with the help of so many people here,” she says.
Gabbie is now a small part of a big movement, one launched by Governor Bill Haslam as part of an effort to boost the percentage of Tennesseans with a college degree by the year 2025.
"[Tennessee is] the very first state in the country to guarantee every high school graduate two years of community college or technical school free of charge," Haslam said in a speech earlier this year.
The initiative’s goal even attracted the attention of the White House. President Obama came to Knoxville in January to announce his intention to expand the idea to a national scale.
The president told a crowd: “And right here, right now, at Pellissippi State, I’m going to announce one of my most important State of the Union proposals. And that’s helping every American afford higher education.”
Tennessee Promise is what’s called a last-dollar scholarship, meaning it fills the financial gap for students whose other sources of money – like savings, Pell grants and student loans – don’t cover all their tuition costs. The challenge is keeping students focused long enough to get a two-year degree.
"The way we’ll be looking for success will be the student that enrolls and utilizes Tennessee Promise, how many of them attain a credential or degree over the next few years," says Tennessee Promise's executive director, Mike Krause.
Krause says the program’s success will be judged by graduation rates reported to a national database called IPEDS. So that should be pretty easy, right? Just count the people who are graduating. Not really. Warren Nichols, who keeps up with graduation rates for the Tennessee Board of Regents, says there’s a lot that IPEDS won’t tell you.
"The IPEDS totally disregards part-time students.," says Nichols. "So the graduation rate that we report to IPEDS is only based upon students that are first-time enrolled, and that are enrolled full time their first semester.”
But Mike Krause says those first-time, full-time students are who Tennessee Promise is designed to serve, not part-time students or adults looking for continuing education.
"We really are trying to focus on getting students out, though, because the students that enroll continuously – which is another Tennessee Promise requirement – are the ones with the highest graduation rates,” Krause says.
Some early evidence gives hope to Tennessee Promise supporters. A pilot program called Knox Achieves, launched in 2009, served as a small-scale model. Celeste Carruthers, of the Center for Business and Economic Research, studied it.
"The Knox Achieves participants were much, much more likely to go on to college than their counterparts in other counties," Carruthers says. "So it had a substantial effect on student behavior.”
Gabbie Abbatmarco says Tennessee Promise has already had a substantial effect on her own life.
“Everyone’s guiding you, and tells you step by step what you need to do, so it was a great start,” she says.
And for students like Gabbie, the help offered by Tennessee Promise may become even more valuable in the coming years. This week, officials announced they were cancelling a state-run college savings program. Its earnings couldn’t keep up with rising tuition rates.