Free college? Assessing enrollment responses to the Tennessee Promise program

In this paper, we study a novel, broad-based tuition assistance program within the two-year college sector and contribute new results to both the expansive higher education funding literature and the modest yet fast-growing college promise literature. Starting with the class of 2015, the state of Tennessee has been covering full tuition and fees for any high school graduate who wishes to attend a state-funded two-year college under its unique Tennessee Promise initiative. Exploiting the timing of this policy shock, we employ quasi-experimental methods to document that Tennessee Promise increased full-time first-time undergraduate enrollment at the state's community colleges by at least 40%. We also find a positive response in attendance among black and Hispanic students. An auxiliary analysis shows a short-run reduction of about 2% in enrollment at the state's public four-year institutions, suggesting some degree of substitutability between the unsubsidized and subsidized college sectors. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of future statewide free-college programs.