The Tennessee Promise hasn’t even been implemented yet, people!

Last updated on: February 24, 2015 at 9:37 pm by Jane the Actuary

The Tennessee Promise hasn’t even been implemented yet, people! 2015-02-24T21:37:09-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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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 another issue that I haven’t really seen addressed:

We’re 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. What no one mentions is that this plan has not yet been implemented — this year’s 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). And 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.

(See this FAQ from insidehighered.com for details, or the main Tennessee Promise website.)

Will students who wouldn’t have gone to college at all, now make that decision? That 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. But, given that community colleges are funded as much by state and local taxes as by tuition, there’d have to be an increasing in state/local funding, to accomodate these new students — whether in existing programs and building, with the marginal cost of adding more instructors only, or with expansion of campuses and increases in overhead. Otherwise, you’ll ended up with students unable to register for the classes they need for their programs, and worse off than without the program.

Will students who would have gone to a four-year school, stay at home instead? In addition to the above funding/capacity issues, there’s 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’s not clear to me that the graduation-rates studies are really able to provide an apples-to-apples comparision).

Will students’ decisions be wholly unchanged, with money going solely to fund middle-class kids who would have otherwise paid for their schooling themselves? There’s an opportunity cost to that. The Tennessee money is being touted as if it’s “free” because it comes from the lottery, but this money could always have been spent elsewhere — and, as this local piece indicates, this program takes away money that could have otherwise funded higher education in other ways.

Now, after a couple years, it should be possible for this program to be evaluated and conclusions drawn about what worked, what didn’t, and what unintended consequences may have arisen. But to scale up from something that is still a matter of projections and estimates is foolhardy.

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