Is Tennessee's Free College Program A Model For The Nation?

The four-year-old policy has boosted enrollment, but dropout rates remain high

- Reade Pickert

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 have 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 complimentary 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.