NADWORNY: The other thing is that running behind all of this is just the dramatic drop in enrollment that community colleges have seen since the start of the pandemic. It's an I will go to college and this is what I will do because it's tuition-free. It's not kind of a can I or should I go to college in many cases anymore.
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And Tennessee has had a statewide free college program since 2015.ĮMILY HOUSE: It's really changed over the past six years, the ways that students and their families talk about going to college. She's the executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.
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If students and families are clear that tuition is free, it changes the way they make decisions. And research has shown that messaging is key. The value of a tuition-free program, especially a federal tuition-free program, is that it's in the name, right? Like, it's free. So for a lot of students, they don't know until the last minute how much, if anything, college will cost because they're piecing together a bunch of different things, filling out different financial aid forms, applying to scholarships. Two, it's this idea that geography would no longer dictate if you had a free college program nearby.
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The federal government can put in money that states and localities just can't. But let me ask you, if we already do have all these individual programs, why would we even need a national one? At the national level, it can sometimes be seen as a handout or a gift, rather than an economic return on investment.ĬHANG: OK. And without that, local businesses suffer, states suffer. So in communities, free college is much more about the economic, the workforce program because community colleges are where local people are trained to get jobs. NADWORNY: And at the local and state level, it's actually a bipartisan issue. So in terms of real people, free college is actually really popular. Wait, so what I don't get is if these free college programs have been successful at the local and state levels, why did this program fail at the federal level, you think? But at a minimum, their goal is to make two-year tuition-free community college a reality, and they use a mix of federal, state, local, public and private funding to do that.ĬHANG: OK. NADWORNY: So promise programs can look really different depending on where you live. So it's - the movement is still alive and well. ROSYE CLOUD: When you look at these promise programs, you really feel the community support behind it. Here's Rosye Cloud, a leader at College Promise, a national organization that tracks many of those programs. And that 300-plus number is up from about 50 programs just six years ago. at the state or local level in places like Dallas, Kalamazoo, Mich., El Dorado, Ark.
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There are more than 300 free college or, as they're often called, promise programs throughout the U.S. Can you just talk about how those programs work exactly? Well, we did mention that nearly every state does have some kind of free college program. According to a review by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, free community college would have boosted the GDP by roughly $170 billion per year.ĬHANG: Wow. It was expected to be a real boon for the economy. NADWORNY: So the plan called for the federal government to give billions of dollars to states each year in exchange for the state to eliminate tuition and fees at their community colleges. Hey, Elissa.ĬHANG: All right, so let's just start with the obituary part of this. NPR's Elissa Nadworny joins us now to tell us more. And although the national effort failed, various free college programs do exist in almost every state. That program would have made community colleges tuition-free for the next five years. It was also one of the first proposals that got dropped as Democrats began to negotiate and trim their social agenda in Congress. Free community college was one of President Biden's big campaign promises.