Seven years after Oregon launched the country’s second “college promise” program offering tuition-free community college to high school graduates, the initiative has made minimal to no progress on several of its stated goals.

Oregon Promise has not led to long-term increases in community college enrollment or moved the needle on community college completion rates. It hasn’t closed gaps in college access for students from minority groups or rural parts of the state. And while it has made college more affordable for some students, the grant’s impact on that metric has been minimal: State studies estimate that community college is now affordable for an additional 1% of students thanks to the promise grant.

The Oregon Legislature funded the college promise program in 2015, after President Barack Obama pitched taking Tennessee’s heralded tuition-free community college promise nationwide. Obama’s drive was unsuccessful, but Oregon became the second state to launch such a grant.

“The original idea truly was a promise,” said former state Sen. Mark Hass, a Beaverton Democrat who championed the effort. “If you can finish high school, enroll in a community college program, maintain passing grades and stay out of trouble, the state promises to pick up the tab for your community college tuition.”

The goal was to catch the attention of high school graduates who weren’t planning to go to college from high school and help make college more affordable for them, Hass said.

The idea sounds simple. But the original design of Oregon Promise, including limiting it to students with at least a 2.5 high school GPA, hamstrung its progress.

State researchers say that the Oregon program’s eligibility criteria narrowed the pool of recipients to students who were already likely to go to college, instead of propelling loads of new students down the college-going path. And while the scholarship has improved college affordability for some, its impact is limited by the size of the awards and the number of students who receive one.

Oregon officials recently made changes to the grant intended to address a number of the design flaws. As state officials wait to see the outcome of those changes and lawmakers weigh its future funding, experts and promise recipients offer mixed advice on how to further tweak Oregon Promise to best serve students.

“Design matters,” said Wil Del Pilar, vice president for higher education at the Education Trust, a national nonprofit focused on equitable student outcomes. “Not all statewide free college (programs), or even regional ones, are created equal.”

No lasting impact on enrollment and completion

Each year, some 4,500 to 6,000 graduating high school seniors are awarded the Oregon Promise to cover their community college tuition.

Most years, there is no income limit, meaning students from high-income families can go to community college without paying tuition. But some years, depending on grant funding and the number of applicants, students from high or even moderate-income families weren’t eligible.

To access the grant, students must enroll in community college within six months of graduation and take at least a half-time college course load. Until this academic year, students also had to have the 2.5 GPA and pay a $50 copay each term.

Those features are atypical — several other state promise grants don’t have GPA requirements.

“If part of the goal of the Oregon Promise was to allow lower-income, racial ethnic minority and first-generation collegegoers to get onto some kind of postsecondary pathway, that 2.5 GPA was probably working at cross purposes to that,” said Michelle Miller-Adams, senior researcher at Michigan-based nonprofit W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Oregon Promise did create a jump in community college enrollment at the start. Some 29% of the class of 2016 enrolled in community college after graduation, an increase of 3 percentage points from the year before. But that hasn’t held. By 2018, college-going numbers were back to the pre-promise range. They’ve fallen steeply since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when colleges going online and a hot labor market propelled high school graduates straight into the workforce.

Early research from federally funded Portland-based regional education research lab REL Northwest suggested that, in its first few years, Oregon Promise increased the likelihood that awardees would both finish their first year of college and continue toward graduation. State studies found an uptick in the percentage of 2016 high school graduates who earned a college credential within three years. But rates declined after that.

With the limited data available so far, the state report says, it does not appear that Oregon Promise has made lasting improvements to college completion.

The grant also hasn’t thrown the doors to community college wide open for students from all races, in all corners of the state. The commission’s 2022 analysis found that white students and Asian students are still enrolling in community college at higher rates than their Black, Latino and Indigenous peers. And while college-going increased for urban students, it did not for students in rural areas, exacerbating the urban-rural divide.

The state has recently made changes intended to fix several of these trends. In 2022, the Legislature agreed to lower the GPA requirement to 2.0, a move that research suggests will make the grant more accessible to low-income students, students of color and special education recipients. The state also got rid of the $50 copay and increased the minimum grant award available to students. Initially, students whose need-based federal and state financial aid fully covered tuition were given promise grants of $1,000 to help pay for books, fees and food; now that minimum is $2,000.

“All three of the recent programmatic changes that the Oregon Promise made were absolutely made in the right direction,” Miller-Adams said. “But it might have worked better if they’d been in place from the beginning.”

Affordability improves a little

The grant’s biggest success is that it makes college less unaffordable for Oregon’s high school graduates.

But it only makes college affordable for an additional 1% of students attending Oregon’s community colleges. The state estimates that 800 or so students are able to fully cover their cost of college — including not just tuition but also living expenses and books — thanks to the Oregon Promise.

Bennett George considers himself among them. George’s parents make enough money that he didn’t qualify for need-based aid to help pay for college, but not enough to help George cover all the costs of school.

Because of the way Oregon Promise is structured, George qualifies for the maximum grant — $4,128 this year — to cover the cost of tuition for his associate of science degree at Portland Community College. He hopes to someday work with kids at Oregon’s Outdoor School.

“I would really be struggling to pay for college if it wasn’t for Oregon Promise,” George said. “Not having to take on that financial burden made it a lot more possible for me to go to community college.”

In order to snag an Oregon Promise grant, a student first has to apply for need-based aid from the state and federal governments. The promise grant then fills the gap between any need-based aid and the average cost of tuition at an Oregon community college. This is what’s called a “last-dollar” program, because it first takes other aid dollars into account.

The last-dollar structure helps limit what Oregon Promise costs the state, because it leverages federal dollars to help students pay for school. In general, a full federal Pell grant covers the cost of tuition at an Oregon community college, so the state is only on the hook for $2,000 in promise funds for students with the greatest financial need.

But research shows last-dollar promise programs also show minimal to no improvements in equity, the state report says.

While low-income students make up the bulk of Oregon Promise recipients, most of the grant money goes to middle-income students who get less need-based aid.

While Oregon is more generous than most states in offering a minimum grant, the previous $1,000 minimum grant may not have been “enough to close equity gaps in college-going rates,” the state report says.

Some 39% of students who receive the promise still can’t meet the cost of attending college even if they’re working, the state report found, meaning they likely have to take on debt to cover the bills. That number is as high as 62% for low-income promise recipients.