The Tennessee Promise hasn't even been implemented yet, people!<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Yes, there's little point in addressing the "free community college" plan yet again, considering that it has no chance of being enacted, but here's\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/the-tennessee-promise-hasnt-even-been-implemented-yet-people.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Tennessee Promise hasn't even been implemented yet, people!\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yes, there's little point in addressing the "free community college" plan yet again, considering that it has no chance of being enacted, but here's\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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{"id":86,"date":"2015-01-24T13:43:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-24T19:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/the-tennessee-promise-hasnt-even-been-implemented-yet-people.html"},"modified":"2015-02-24T21:37:09","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T03:37:09","slug":"the-tennessee-promise-hasnt-even-been-implemented-yet-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/the-tennessee-promise-hasnt-even-been-implemented-yet-people.html","title":{"rendered":"The Tennessee Promise hasn’t even been implemented yet, people!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

We\u2019re told that this is modeled after the Tennessee Promise, a plan that uses state lottery money to fund free community college for Tennessee recent high school graduates who meet certain criteria. \u00a0What no one mentions is that this plan has not yet been implemented<\/i> \u2014 this year\u2019s class of high school graduates is the first to be eligible for the funds (and the program is only for students who enter college immediately upon graduating high school, by the way). \u00a0And what that means is that this is an experiment, and Obama and his advisors are ready to scale this up to nationwide implementation without making the effort to see if this experiment works to begin with.<\/p>\n

(See this FAQ from insidehighered.com<\/a> for details, or the main Tennessee Promise website<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Will students who wouldn\u2019t have gone to college at all, now make that decision? \u00a0That would be a good outcome, presuming that they make good choices once they arrive, that lead towards a transfer elsewhere, or that provide useful skills for employment. \u00a0But, given that community colleges are funded as much by state and local taxes as by tuition, there\u2019d have to be an increasing in state\/local funding, to accomodate these new students \u2014 whether in existing programs and building, with the marginal cost of adding more instructors only, or with expansion of campuses and increases in overhead. \u00a0Otherwise, you\u2019ll ended up with students unable to register for the classes they need for their programs, and worse off than without the program.<\/p>\n

Will students who would have gone to a four-year school, stay at home instead? \u00a0In addition to the above funding\/capacity issues, there\u2019s the fact that, for many students, the higher tuition of a four-year school is worth the money, taking into account the higher graduation rates at four-year schools, compared to starting at a community college with the intention to transfer (though it\u2019s not clear to me that the graduation-rates studies are really able to provide an apples-to-apples comparision).<\/p>\n

Will students\u2019 decisions be wholly unchanged, with money going solely to fund middle-class kids who would have otherwise paid for their schooling themselves? \u00a0There\u2019s an opportunity cost to that. \u00a0The Tennessee money is being touted as if it\u2019s \u201cfree\u201d because it comes from the lottery, but this money could always have been spent elsewhere \u2014 and, as this local piece indicates<\/a>, this program takes away money that could have otherwise funded higher education in other ways.<\/p>\n

Now, after a couple years, it should be possible for this program to be evaluated and conclusions drawn about what worked, what didn\u2019t, and what unintended consequences may have arisen. \u00a0But to scale up from something that is still a matter of projections and estimates is foolhardy.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"