[2] Higher education in the United States has been restrictive for most of US history, serving elites at first, and slowly growing more egalitarian from the 1800s to the early 2000s.
[5] In 2014, Tennessee was the first state to initiate a program for free tuition at community colleges.
[6] In his 2015 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama proposed making community college tuition free to many residents of the US.
[9] The College Promise advisory board consists of 37 leaders representing interests from education, business, philanthropy, labor, nonprofits, government, and students.
[14] One of the early Promise Programs began in 2007 in the Pacific Northwest; graduating students from one high school were able to attend their first year of a local community college due to scholarships with both government and private funding.
The selected high school was located in a large city in a low-income neighborhood, and more than half of the students were minorities.
Despite the high retention rates observed in this study, few students were placed into college-level math and English classes, and the average college grade point average (GPA) during their freshman year was 1.83, suggesting that students were not prepared in high school for the rigor of college classes.
[16] The Oregon Promise is a “last-dollar” scholarship, meaning that aid will only be rewarded after all other federal loans are applied, such as the Pell Grant.
In 2016–2017, students from middle-income families received 53% of all aid rewarded from the Oregon Promise because they did not meet the requirements for the Pell Grant, while lower-income families received 47% of tuition covered because slightly higher percentages of these students qualified for more federal and state grants.
The effects of the Promise Program made many positive advancements in Kalamazoo, especially since many of the students in KPS came from poorer communities.
[18] Although there are many reasons why free higher education is beneficial to society, there are also problems that will arise if Promise Programs are instituted nationwide.