A Promise Worth Keeping? Impacts of Free Community College on Degrees and Earnings

This combines two papers that previously circulated as "A Promise Worth Keeping? Impacts of Tennessee Promise" (Schoonover, 2025) and "Free community college and college completion: Evidence from Tennessee" (Attridge, Carruthers & Welch, 2025). We thank many people for valuable comments and feedback as this project evolved, including Cameron Conrad, Bruno Ferman, Amanda Klafehn, Brian Cadena, Terra McKinnish, Tania Barham, Richard Mansfield, Oded Gurantz, Canyon Bosler, and seminar and conference participants at the Association for Education Finance and Policy, University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, Virginia Tech, University of Florida, University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty, Cornell University, University of Colorado Boulder, Triangle Economics of Education Workshop, Southern Economic Association, Upjohn Institute, and University of Nebraska. An early phase of this project was supported by funding from the Gates Foundation and Tennessee Higher Education Commission. Attridge is currently employed by the State of Tennessee and has collaborated with the Tennessee Higher Education Commission to support the use of data related to the Tennessee Promise program. All opinions and errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.