In January this year, Governor Haslam launched a new initiative designed to increase college degree completion to 55 percent in Tennessee. Termed the Drive to 55, the program is designed to boost the number of Tennessee residents with at least a 2 year college degree to 55 percent by 2025.
The key component of this plan is the Tennessee Promise. The Tennessee Promise guarantees that all Tennessee high school graduates would be able to attend an in-state community or technical college. To increase accessibility, the state would pay tuition not covered by Pell or other federal financial aid at a cost of approximately $34 million annually.
Let me first say that I highly approve of the governor’s plan. A college degree is one of the surest paths to both individual and state-wide economic success and we should do everything we can to increase college access. However, the Tennessee Promise contains a hidden trap that, if not adequately addressed, threatens to undermine its potential. The trap is that the Tennessee Promise requires participants to complete a FAFSA to qualify for financial aid.
This is a problem for two reasons. First, it’s a problem because currently not enough Tennessee seniors complete the FAFSA to make the progress called for in the Drive to 55. A quick look at the numbers shows that if every FAFSA completing senior in Tennessee obtains a 2-year degree or better and stays in state (a tenuous assumption at best, but I’ll go with it), yearly we’re still 78,000 degrees short of what we need yearly to meet the governor’s vision by 2025. The following is a quick breakdown of how I came to this conclusion.
According to FAFSA’s website, around 45,000 Tennessee students completed the FAFSA last year out of 62,000 graduates (numbers from NEA, pg 12). The population in Tennessee currently is about 6.4 million. According to a statement by the governor last fall, 32% of Tennesseans currently hold a 2-year degree or higher, which is about 2.1 million people. To reach 55% by 2025, assuming zero population growth, we need approximately 1.5 million additionally degrees over the next 12 years.
Divide this number by the number of years between now and then and this means we need approximately 123,000 new degrees a year starting this year to achieve this number.
Even if all 45,000 current FAFSA completing seniors each year attend and attain 2-year or better degrees in Tennessee, we’re still 78,000 short.
To be fair, the governor’s proposal includes two other mechanisms targeted at adults (Reconnect and Leap) which would help make a dent in this number. But in my mind as the Tennessee Promise is the primary mechanism by which we can achieve the governor’s vision. Therefore, we need to dramatically increase our numbers of FAFSA completers if we are going to have any hope of achieving the Drive to 55’s goal.
The second component of this trap is in how we get these additional FAFSA completers. Data suggests the greatest potential for increasing FAFSA completion is found in lower-income and first generation college students. But these are the very students who struggle the most to complete the FAFSA.
Evidence suggests that low-income and first generation college students often fail to successfully complete the FAFSA. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that these students struggle to complete the FAFSA because of the complexity of the form and because they often lack a basic understanding of how financial aid works. This leads to a low completion rate in this population and therefore lack of access to these important financial resources.
So in summary, we need more FAFSA completers and the population with the most room to grow in this area is the population that struggles the most with completing the FAFSA process. Here is the trap that, if left unaddressed, threatens to derail the governor’s vision.
However, the program does have a mechanism built in which has the potential to overcome this trap. This is the all important mentor program. The mentor program would include 3000 volunteer mentors, each of which would serve up to 10 students at a high school. These mentors would be charged with helping their mentees overcome barriers to college such as the FAFSA.
The mentorship program is the key to expanding FAFSA access, but it seems like more of an afterthought than a central component of this plan. Because of this I have three concerns with the program as it is currently conceived. First, all 3,000 mentors would be volunteers only, which calls their quality into question. Second, the training to be received by volunteers is vague and unspecified. Third, the mentor program is the type of thing that looks ripe for a cut for lawmakers looking to reduce costs.
To address this potential trap, I propose the following fixes to the Promise Plan. First, language should be added specifying that the training required for mentors specifically include a minimum number of hours training on how to navigate the federal financial aid process. Second, mentors should be compensated or even part-time to ensure they have the time to provide the required support to their mentees with navigating the FAFSA process. Third, the governor should initiate a PR campaign to raise awareness of the importance of the mentoring program to the success of the Promise Plan.
The Drive to 55 and in particular the Tennessee Promise Plan has the potential to expand access to higher education for Tennessee high school students and in doing so dramatically improve Tennessee’s economy in the long term. For these reasons it should absolutely have the support of lawmakers around Tennessee. But its success hinges on lawmakers awareness and willingness to address the roadblock embedded in the legislation by the FAFSA requirement. They would do well to ensure appropriate resources are put towards raising the number of FAFSA completers in our state. Without it the program will not be able to live up to its name as the Tennessee Promise.
By Jon Alfuth
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