The Tennessean -- TENNESSEE PROMISE: YOU CAN’T BUILD SUCCESS ON FAILURE

In his 2016 State of the State address, Governor Haslam bragged that “Tennessee is the first state in the nation to offer high school graduates two years of community or technical college free of tuition and fees. And we’re doing that without raising any taxes.” Free community college without increased taxes may sound great but Tennessee Promise is not free. It comes at the expense of students who have achieved academic success to attain the Tennessee HOPE Scholarship.

Tennessee Promise is funded by revenues raided from the lottery, funds intended for students who worked hard to earn the HOPE scholarship. The “free” Tennessee Promise has already resulted in cuts to the HOPE scholarship awards. HOPE scholarships have been cut from $4,000 to $3,500 for freshmen and sophomores and the Aspire Award for students whose family income is $36,000 or less has been cut from $3,000 per year to $2,250. The less affluent HOPE scholars are essentially “paying” $1,250 per year to support the Promise program. Further, all future lottery revenue growth will be directed to Promise and this will ensure that the HOPE scholarship becomes more of a stipend over time as tuitions rise against a stagnant scholarship. That is just flat-out wrong.

Scholarships are traditionally granted based on merit and/or need, yet merit and need diminish and/or eliminate access to Promise. There is no academic standard to qualify for the Promise and there is much concern that those who will receive the Promise are not prepared for college. A recently released State Comptroller’s study found that 75 percent of freshmen at the state’s community colleges did not meet their school’s criteria for college readiness.

Promise will not benefit the poor because it is a last dollar scholarship. The state will cover only the tuition costs left after a student applies for financial aid, such as a Pell Grant or the Hope scholarship. The federal need-based Pell Grant provides up to $5,700—nearly $2,000 more than the cost of full-time tuition at a community college in Tennessee. So the neediest students will not benefit at all and the highest achieving students will receive little or no benefit from Promise.

There are legitimate fears, mine included, that ill-prepared students will receive Promise and then fail to complete community college. Only 7.7 percent of Tennessee community college students graduate in 2 years. It’s a safe assumption that many of those who graduate are HOPE scholarship recipients whose high school academic performance and ACT scores were predictors of their success.

Without the cash cow of the lottery revenue, we would not be talking about the Promise program. The revenue resource drove the decision. But redistributing lottery revenues will not be without cost to Tennesseans. Those who have worked hard to qualify for the HOPE will watch their scholarships become less valuable as tuition costs increase and the HOPE scholarship stagnates.

It is not too late for the Tennessee General Assembly to realize that future lottery growth should be directed to the HOPE scholarship program which rewards hard work and also benefits those in greatest need with the Aspire grant. The HOPE cuts should be restored and future lottery revenue growth should be dedicated to increasing the Aspire grant income threshold to benefit more middle income families.

While the lottery has been a tremendous success it produces only a finite amount of money, not enough to do all things for all people. It produces enough to do what the people voted for it to do: reward and incentivize high school students and encourage continued academic success. There is something profoundly wrong with breaking one promise to make another.