A recently published article in the Hechinger Report about a free tuition plan offered by five community colleges in the San Antonio area motivated me to write about it as well.
Hechinger reporter Wayne D’Orio writes about a new program called Alamo Promise. Promise programs that pay for college tuition are not new. Mr. D’Orio cites a UPenn GSE database indicating that there are more than 400 nationwide, 10 of which are in Texas.
However, five participating community colleges (known as the Alamo Colleges District) provide more than free tuition. Included in their program are a wide array of services to all their students ranging from low-cost healthcare to daycare programs to food pantries. The program even offers an emergency financial aid program that can help students pay for car repairs, rent, or medical expenses.
Mr. D’Orio notes that many of the Promise students would qualify for enough financial aid to attend college for free without this program (most likely because the maximum Pell Grant covers the annual cost of tuition and fees at almost all community colleges). However, the program’s promise to provide free tuition plus the other services makes the complicated process of applying for federal financial aid much simpler to understand and complete.
While the five Alamo Colleges’ overall enrollment decreased by 5.5 percent from fall 2020 to fall 2021, the enrollments from the 25 high schools targeted for the Promise program have increased by 17 percent. Over 85 percent of the 2,423 first year students admitted this fall are Hispanic. The Alamo Promise students can be either full-time or part-time (a valuable differentiator for working adult students also supporting a family).
San Antonio’s mayor, Ron Nirenberg, states that it’s his hope that the Promise program will increase the local supply of IT and healthcare workers as well as end the cycle of generational poverty existing in San Antonio.
The program’s cost and services make a difference. One student interviewed stated that it would have taken her six years of working and saving money to pay for college.
The five community colleges participating in the program selected 25 San Antonio high schools where the majority have not gone to college and where the poverty rates are high. Alamo Promise offers graduates of these high schools three years of fully paid tuition and fees after students apply for financial aid. There are no income limits for the program.
Year 1 of the program resulted in a cost for the program of $2,000 per student. The in-state tuition for a full-time student is $3,112. Total program cost was $1.87 million in fiscal year 2021, less than one percent of the five school’s combined budgets. The Promise program costs listed are only for student tuition and fees. The other services offered are available to all students and are incorporated in the schools’ regular budgets.
In the fall of 2022, the Alamo Promise program will expand to 47 San Antonio area schools. The local high schools run pep rallies to highlight the offer and try to get students to apply to the Alamo program. In the fall of 2019, approximately 60 percent of eligible students applied for financial aid and admission to one of the Alamo colleges. The enrollment rate of those students was approximately 50 percent.
Operating the program takes a lot of coordination with counselors at each of the colleges. The Alamo colleges revamped their counseling philosophy to ensure that students meet with their counselors at regular intervals and that guided pathways were created to map all their programs to either local jobs or transfers to four-year colleges. As a result, the average time to complete an associate degree has decreased from 4.6 years to 3.76 years.
When Covid forced the five colleges to go online in the spring of 2020, the 150 counselors employed logged nearly one million interactions with students ranging from their guided pathways to tech and connectivity needs and whether they had enough money to eat. As a result, the course completion percentage that semester was 91.8 percent, a record.
Since the program was announced in 2019, it has raised $12 million in private funding. The program has also enabled the schools to raise $450 million in a bond issue. Two of the schools, Palo Alto College and San Antonio College, received $20 million and $15 million in grants from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott and her husband.
When you look at the early success of the Alamo Promise program, you hope that community colleges nationwide will make a trip to San Antonio to observe the programs practices in action. Most outside observers would note that the demographic profile of the prospective students would never lead to such a high success rate.
The five colleges in the consortium have received other accolades. In 2018, the year before the program was announced, the five colleges won the 2018 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Palo Alto College was ranked in the top one percent of community colleges nationally in 2019. San Antonio College won the Aspen Price as the best community college in the country this past year.
In states like Texas where the education and employment outcomes of their high school graduates are tracked (I have written about the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s 60x30TX program in the past), programs like this that increase the college completion rates of low income and minority students are important for the economic sustainability of their communities. I hope to read more about not only the success of the Alamo Promise program but also about community colleges elsewhere that embrace some of the counseling, daycare, and emergency financial aid programs and practices that enable these students to stay on track, graduate, and escape generational poverty.
