The Results Are In: Oregon’s Free Community College Program Failed to Deliver

Headlines declared that Oregon high-school graduates would flock to the state’s community colleges after lawmakers in 2015 approved a program to make tuition essentially free.

The number of new high-school grads attending Oregon’s 17 community colleges could jump by a quarter, state officials assumed. State lawmakers behind the program patted themselves on the back for doing “probably the best thing we could offer young people today.”

The free community college program would be a “win” for students, more of whom would earn college degrees and get better-paying jobs, a state official said. It would also be a plus for the state, which would get more tax revenue from all the new college grads with higher salaries.

Oregon was hailed as a national leader in the free-college movement being championed by then-president Barack Obama and democratic-socialist Senator Bernie Sanders.

Eight years later, the Oregon Promise is in tatters, and it may be on the chopping block.

A new report by the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Committee found that the Oregon Promise has failed by almost every measure. It has failed to encourage more high-school graduates to enroll in college, failed to narrow equity gaps in enrollment, and failed to increase college completion rates. And while it has helped a small number of students afford to go to college, most low-income students approved for the program still can’t meet all the costs.

Eric Fruits, vice president of research for the Cascade Policy Institute in Portland, said the Oregon Promise’s failure was predictable, noting that other free-tuition programs with similar funding structures and eligibility requirements have had similar results. For states still pursuing free-community college, the failure of the Oregon Promise should serve as a warning of the limited impacts a poorly planned program is likely to have.

“While Oregon had some unique issues, overall the findings are not unique to Oregon,” he said. “Other places where this has been tried, you find a small pop in enrollment the first couple of years, and then it comes back down to pre-program levels, doesn’t really seem to do much in the long run to boost enrollment, or even movement onto four-year degrees.”

A ‘Highly-Touted Offer’

Oregon lawmakers established the Oregon Promise in 2015, with the approval of Senate Bill 81. It came on the heels of Obama’s proposal to make community college tuition-free for millions of students nationwide. The bill was signed into law that July by then-governor Kate Brown.

The program promised to cover the average cost of community college tuition, up to $4,900, for high-school graduates with cumulative grade-point averages of 2.5 or higher, or graduates with GED test scores of 145 or higher. Students had a $50 co-pay per term and had to enroll at one of Oregon’s community colleges within six months of graduation.

Oregon was the second state to offer a free-tuition program, only behind Tennessee.

“This just rose to the top as probably the best thing we could offer young people today,” Mark Hass, then a Democrat state senator and champion of the program, told the Oregonian newspaper in July 2015. “Any time more kids get into the post-secondary higher-education system, we’re all going to be better off.”

News reports suggested that thousands of Oregon high-school graduates would be enticed by the “highly-touted offer.” Through the program, taxpayers would even be on the hook to pay tuition for undocumented students, who don’t qualify for federal loans or grants. “Oregon expects teens to flock to ‘free’ community college,” a December 2015 Oregonian headline read.

“So, it’s a win for the student, when they get that certificate or degree,” Bob Brew, who was the director of the state’s Office of Student Access and Completion, told the paper. “It’s good for the state, because the state will get higher tax payments from the student for the higher salary. And having more college-educated Oregonians will be good for the economy overall.”

But there were warnings that the Oregon Promise would not live up to the bold promises — and the warnings weren’t just coming from skeptical conservatives. Both the Oregon Student Association and the Oregon Community College Association were initially opposed to the bill.

Critics worried that the Oregon Promise’s eligibility requirements, particularly the 2.5 GPA requirement, would limit eligibility to students already likely to attend college, and would rule out many students who could most benefit from a nudge to continue with school. Others worried that making community college free would just eat into public university enrollment.

Critics were also concerned that Oregon’s program would not actually help the state’s neediest students. The Oregon Promise, like Tennessee’s program, uses what is called a “last dollar” funding model, meaning that it only pays for tuition that isn’t already covered by Pell grants and other state need-based awards, which applicants are required to apply for. Because those grants and awards are already targeted at lower-income students, some worried the Oregon Promise funds would be skewed toward middle-class students who didn’t get other grants.

To get buy-in, lawmakers amended the bill to provide a minimum of $1,000 to low-income students who qualified for the program, but who had their tuition covered by other programs.

No Improvement in Enrollment, Equity

While the predicted rush of new community college students never really materialized, Oregon did see a slight bump in public college enrollment after the Oregon Promise went into effect for the 2015-16 school year, according to data in the commission’s report.

The percentage of Oregon’s high-school graduates enrolling in community college jumped from 26 percent in the 2014-15 school year to 29 percent the next year, when the Oregon Promise funding was made available. The overall percentage of students enrolling in public higher education jumped slightly from 44.2 percent to 45.9 percent during that same period, but that appears to have been driven almost exclusively by community college enrollment. As some predicted, the percentage of high-school grads enrolling in public universities dropped from 18 percent in 2014-15 to 16 percent in 2015-16, the commission found.

By the 2017-18 school year, two years into the Oregon Promise program, the early enrollment bump was gone. The percentage of high-school grads enrolling in community college was back down to 25 percent. Enrollment plummeted during the Covid-19 pandemic, the report found.

The commission’s report also found no evidence that the program helped to narrow college enrollment gaps based on race, sex, or urban versus rural geography. While college enrollment did increase for black and Hispanic students during the reporting period, “this increase started before the Oregon Promise,” the report found. It also stated that, “Gaps in college-going rates by geography and gender widened since the program began.”

The commission found that the Oregon Promise has helped a relatively small number of students meet the cost of college attendance — “An estimated 700 to 900 additional students are able to meet the cost of attendance each year with the Oregon Promise,” the report said. However, “many students continue to struggle to cover the entire cost of pursuing a college education,” the report added. “This entire cost includes not only tuition and fees, but also housing, books and supplies, transportation, and other personal expenses.”

The commission also found no evidence that the Oregon Promise was leading to sustained increases in high-school graduates enrolling in more college terms or earning more credits.

“Together, these findings suggest that the Oregon Promise has not led to lasting increases in enrollment, momentum, completion, or equity,” the report said. “These findings are consistent with the findings reported in 2020 and are aligned with national research, which has found early but not sustained increases in enrollment and limited or no increases in equity and completion.”

Fruits said the program’s eligibility requirements, particularly the relatively high GPA requirement and the requirement that applicants enroll soon after graduating from high school, may have shut a lot of people out who might have benefited from community college.

“A huge number of community college students are what they call non-traditional students. They may have sat out for a couple of years. They don’t qualify,” he said.

“They were inadvertently helping the people who needed the help the least,” Fruits said.

Despite the documented failures, Hass, the former senator who led the effort to approve the Oregon Promise, has stood by the embattled program. In a 2021 Substack post, he wrote that, “The Oregon Promise has been a game changer for thousands of high school graduates as they study to become paramedics, dental hygienists, diesel mechanics and other vocations that will give them a path to the middle class.”

The Chopping Block?

Last year, in an effort to prop up the failing program, lawmakers approved a bill authorizing several changes to the Oregon Promise. Among the changes: They lowered the minimum GPA requirement to 2.0, increased the minimum award to $2,000, and eliminated the $50 co-pay.

But last week, the Oregonian reported that lawmakers could consider a bill this year to phase out the Oregon Promise all together, and to instead pump more money into financial-aid programs for low-income students, particularly the Oregon Opportunity Grant.

Hass defended the program, telling the paper that it “runs on a very thin budget, punches above its weight and gives hope to middle and high school students.” He added that “no one needs to apologize” for helping to make community college affordable for middle-class students whose families make too much money to qualify for financial aid.

“Instead of cutting the Oregon Promise, policymakers should look at why tuition in Oregon remains so high — higher than in California and Washington,” he told the Oregonian. “That’s a much tougher job.”