Next month, the first students enrolled in the state’s new Tennessee Promise program, which essentially guarantees free tuition for two years of community college, begin classes.
The program, which is the equivalent of a last-dollar scholarship for students who qualify, was begun by Gov. Bill Haslam with the idea of offering higher education for students who otherwise might not have had the opportunity to attend. The hope is that graduation from a two-year or four-year school will increase the likelihood of those students landing better jobs and leading better lives.
The Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS) is now more than a decade old. Though qualification for this scholarship program (generally known as Hope) is more stringent than qualification for Tennessee Promise, some figures from the 2015 Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship Annual Report may provide some predictors of how the new program will fare.
Since Tennessee Promise students will be attending community college, it’s good news that lottery scholarship freshmen who entered community college in the fall of 2014 are coming in more qualified than their counterparts in 2005. Indeed, their mean high school grade-point-average has risen from 3.30 to 3.37, the percentage of students with GPAs of 3.0 or higher has risen from 81 percent to 86 percent and fewer students have had to take remedial/development courses.
In addition, a higher percentage of first-time freshmen in the fall of 2014 – in all categories of higher education – had at least one parent with an associate’s or advanced degree than they did in 2005.