Zjanice Carter was just a child in Seattle when her parents moved the family more than 2,000 miles to Kalamazoo, Michigan, all for a chance at free college for their six children.

“My parents always dreamed of having a big family,” said Carter, now 25 and a college graduate. “But as they realized that dream was really expensive, they began to game plan and pray about how (were) they going to afford to give us the life that they wanted us to have?”

Kalamazoo had what was then a rare program. Anonymous donors in 2005 created what they called the Kalamazoo Promise, a pledge to pay college tuition for any graduate of the Kalamazoo school district. Students would no longer worry about whether they could afford college or if they would graduate with thousands of dollars of debt.

“My parents packed their whole lives into the back of the van and just drove for 33 hours, the whole way, trusting that this community would keep its promise,” Carter recalled.

Kalamazoo did keep its promise — for all six Carter children, who each earned college degrees without tuition bills — along with about 9,000 graduates who have had college tuition bills paid since the program launched. A little more than half of those students who started college earned a certificate or degree.

The Kalamazoo Promise marked its 20th anniversary in November by pairing a celebratory banquet with a conference of researchers and advocates of similar “promise” programs across the country that Kalamazoo helped inspire.

In some cases, donors in communities rallied to raise private funds that would guarantee tuition payments for decades. In others, individual colleges, cities or states commit tax dollars to covering tuition.

The anniversary was also occasion to take stock of challenges that promise programs face as the Trump administration reshapes school laws and federal funding of schools, states and social service organizations.

“It’s an important time for the Promise movement,” said Michelle Miller-Adams, senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute and organizer of a panel on the federal changes. “We’re here celebrating two decades of innovation around place-based scholarships, as well as the many thousands of students served by Promise programs. At the same time, though, we need to attend to policy changes that could make the coming decade more difficult.”

She said “attacks” on the U.S. Department of Education, changes to student loan rules and accreditation, as well as potential threats to Pell grants students rely on are “altering the landscape of federal higher education policy and may challenge the foundation on which Promise programs are built.”

All of those factors could affect promise programs in different ways — in how well students are supported while they prepare for college, how much tax money is left for publicly-funded promise programs and how much money a promise program will need to cover tuition to keep their promise.

Ryan Fewlins-Bliss, executive director of the nonprofit Michigan College Access Network, told The 74 that navigating the political climate today is “scarier” than before.

“I think people are really worried about the existence of their organizations and their missions, and their fundraising, their donations…their federal funds,” he said.

There’s even concern that federal cuts to Medicaid will push health care costs to states, which will leave less money in state budgets to support state colleges and to support state promise programs.

 “We could again see declining college affordability as a result of state budget choices,” said Sameer Gadkaree, outgoing CEO of The Institute for College Access & Success.

Though it might be the best-known, Kalamazoo isn’t the first such “promise” program — the first came in the 1960s in Philomath, Oregon — but the city of 73,000 was key in drawing attention to a strategy to give students hope that if they finish high school, college was within reach.

In the 20 years since the Kalamazoo Promise was announced, similar programs have grown dramatically across the country, from just 10 in 2005 to more than 200 today, by one count, as cities like Pittsburgh, New Haven, CT, and El Dorado, AR, have started their own programs.

Several states also started statewide scholarship efforts, including California, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee, while Michigan added promise programs in Detroit and other cities.

College Promise, a Washington, D.C., non-profit that advocates for the programs, reports an even greater growth when including other broad and inclusive scholarship programs — 53 such scholarships in 2015 to more than 450 today.

“Absolutely, we can trace many of the community-based programs to the Kalamazoo Promise modeling effect,” said Michelle Miller-Adams of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “The Kalamazoo Promise got a ton of national publicity when it was first created, and that is part of the reason many other communities decided to give the model a try.”

Former President Barack Obama brought some of that attention when he at a city high school, telling students their chance to “chase your own dreams without incurring a mountain of debt” was an “incredible gift.” 

Since then, researchers have found that promise programs can improve college readiness, enrollment and completion, along with increasing property values modestly, as families like the Carters increase demand for houses. 

Because promise programs can differ greatly — most notably in the type of colleges they pay for or whether students must contribute their federal Pell Grants first — comparisons are rarely simple.

But researchers have shown:

• College promise programs lead to more students enrolling in college than before the programs started.
• The pandemic caused a break in that pattern, with fewer students everywhere enrolling in college than pre-pandemic. But students in promise programs are still enrolling in college more than in comparable cities.
• Students are to believe they will earn an associates degree or higher with help from a promise program, with disadvantaged racial groups sometimes expecting a 30-percentage-point gain.

“The adoption of a promise program had meaningful impacts on local high school students’expectations to ultimately attain an associate degree or higher,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Assistant Professor Taylor Odle reported in 2022.

Promise programs can also help cities. Though they don’t draw flocks of families looking to take advantage of them, multiple studies have shown they draw some. Communities tend to either lose fewer residents if the region is declining or gain some population — about 1.7 percent, — compared to similar communities.

Programs like Kalamazoo’s, that give students 10 years of scholarship eligibility, can also help students whose career path isn’t clear. Jacqueline Bell, a 2021 graduate of Kalamazoo Central High School, tried culinary and cosmetology programs at two separate colleges before deciding to pursue becoming a pastry chef at Kalamazoo Valley Community College.

“I would still be doing this, even without the promise,” Bell said. “This is just what I love to do. But having that promise definitely helped and kept me here … and in less debt. I’m very grateful that I don’t have to worry about that.”

At the same time, some question whether the programs truly help low-income students that most need it. Federal Pell Grants can typically cover community college tuition for the poorest students already, even if there is no promise program in place.

Promise programs also rarely cover room, board and transportation, costs students have to pay themselves while attending college full time. Since about 75 percent of promise programs cover tuition only after Pell Grants have been spent, students can’t use the grants to cover those costs. 

“Since most promise scholarships only cover tuition and fees, low-income students may not receive any money,” University of Georgia researcher Meredith Billings the Brookings Institution. “Instead, these programs tend to subsidize middle- or high-income students.”

Promise advocates also have additional concerns about low-income students and those of racial minorities. They worry that if federal grants to nonprofits that help these students are cut, students might not get the support they need before graduating from high school, leaving them less prepared for college. And philanthropies that would otherwise support a local promise program could shift money to cover gaps for those students from lost federal grants instead.

“The offices that supported them are going away,” said Fewins-Bliss. “The scholarships that supported them are going away. The people that supported them are going away. 

Those concerns are tempered, however, by what backers say is strong bipartisan support from states, who see appeal both in helping disadvantaged students find a path forward, but also as a way to build a more skilled and educated workforce to boost the state economy. Many promise programs have evolved so that connecting students to internships and jobs is as much a part of their mission as paying college tuition.

“You have students that are less likely to use social assistance,” John Barnshaw, senior leader of research and policy for College Promise told The 74. “You have students that are now more likely to have jobs full time and contribute to an educated workforce (and) higher tax base.”

Even within Kalamazoo and other urban areas, promise programs are constantly fighting to have families take school seriously and believe that college is right for their children. Kalamazoo Public Schools Superintendent Darrin Slade said his district had more than 50 percent of high school students chronically absent after the pandemic and there are still students who don’t take advantage of the scholarships, even just for trade school.

“We’re fighting old narratives, cultural biases, any number of things that will keep a student feeling that even though the opportunity is here and it’s the most universal offering that we could imagine, that they still think it’s not for them,” he said.

As Miller-Adams added, “It’s not enough just to understand the value of what’s on offer. People need to show up and see it through.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that a study found an increase in college degrees earned under college promise programs. The study covered increases in student beliefs that they would earn a degree, not degrees earned.

The programs, in which students are promised free college tuition if they graduate high school, have long been considered a silver bullet against the soaring tuition and loan debt blocking many young people, particularly those who are low-income, from earning degrees and finding fulfilling careers.

But in the last few years, college promise programs from Kalamazoo to New Haven, Buffalo, Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, have realized that paying tuition alone doesn’t always achieve the ultimate goal of making lives better. So they have added staff and built partnerships with business to start internship, mentorship and apprentice programs that give “promise scholars” a start on career paths.

Further highlighting the shift, college promise advocates nationally will hold their fourth Nov. 8 and 9 at the University of Tennessee. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and First Lady Jill Biden will speak at the event, whose major topics include “Empowering Career Exploration and Pathway Discovery” and “Building the Promise Pipeline of Workers.”

“We’re quick to say ‘Go to college, get your degree,’ but you don’t have that follow up piece of what do you do after that?” said Jade Scott, who works with the Detroit Promise through the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce Foundation. “So many students get lost in the shuffle, like ‘I’m done with my degree, what do I do now? And this is where we really come in.”

“Now, we’re talking about how we get them employed,” Scott added. “What are we doing to support you, as you make that journey from these college classes into an actual career that you genuinely enjoy, or that’s making you money, or that’s offering you a sustaining lifestyle?” 

Detroit Promise, with the help of the chamber, gave 450 students work experiences such as internships or job shadowing in the 2022-23 school year, Scott said.

The Kalamazoo Promise, perhaps the best-known promise program in the nation, considers the internship program it launched in 2022 so important it calls it “Higher Promise.” 

Cetera DiGiovanni, Higher Promise coordinator, said parents previously kept asking if Promise officials knew of open jobs while businesses repeatedly asked the program for help finding talent.

“We know that kids are graduating and no one has jobs,” DiGiovanni said. “We thought we would be the mediator to bring them together.”

David Rust, executive director of Say Yes Buffalo, said the evolution is natural. Say Yes Buffalo, which started as a scholarship program in 2011, placed 25 students in apprenticeships in the fall of 2022 and another 25 this year.

“It stands to reason that there will be refinements, expansion of features, because we know a lot more now about what scholars and students need,” he said.

College promise programs began in the 1990s with individual philanthropists adopting single schools and pledging to cover college tuition for any student that graduated from high school and enrolled in college. Anonymous donors in Kalamazoo started a citywide promise program in 2005, then other promise programs like Say Yes to Education expanded from single schools in the 1990s to the cities of Syracuse and Buffalo, New York, Greensboro County, North Carolina, and finally Cleveland in 2019.

States like Tennessee have also added statewide promise programs as the ranks have swelled to more than 400 programs nationally. The programs differ in what colleges they pay for, with some covering only the local community college, some only in-state public colleges and others including private universities that choose to be partners with them.

But once lauded for wiping out the worries of tuition debt, promise programs have found that students, particularly low-income students, also need chances to test drive careers they think they might like. They need mentors in their field. They need workplace experience before graduating and seeking a full-time job.

Sometimes students simply need a paycheck while they are in school to pay for rent, commuting to class and meals, which promise programs rarely cover. Or they skip college altogether because class time takes away earning time they need to help their families.

“Free college can be too expensive for students,” said Rust. “A lot of our scholars, over 50 percent, have combined family income below $40,000. So, we’ve seen this more so than ever throughout the pandemic, you (students) do what you have to do, not necessarily what you want to do.”

There’s also benefit to the regional economy when students find careers that keep them in the city after college. 

In Columbus, Ohio, where a pilot promise program pays for Columbus school district graduates to attend Columbus State Community College, companies such as Nationwide Insurance and gas and electricity supplier IGS Energy are eager to take on promise students in college as paid interns.

John Wharton, 19, a second year finance student at Columbus State, started work at IGS this fall helping manage and audit customer accounts for $18 an hour. Because he has an interest in marketing too, his supervisors are also trying to find chances to work in that department.

“It gives you a sense of feeling for what the real world is,” said Wharton, who had never had a job before the internship. “This gives people a platform to gain insight, whether or not they actually want to do what they’re studying.”

Abdallahi Thiaw, 20, also a Columbus Promise student, also just started as an intern this fall with the Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio for $20 an hour for 20 hours a week. Since he is earning an associates degree in interactive media, developing apps and programs that can be used on mobile devices, the board has him developing a chat program for its website that lets users find out what services the nonprofit provides.

“It’s a big opportunity for students like me, because a lot of job fields will tell you that once you graduate, you need experience,” said Thiaw. “But the main issue is nobody’s offering experience, so how are you going to get that experience? But with this program, it offers students like me experience and on top of that, you get paid great wages, which really helps us in focusing on school.”

David Campbell, director of communications for the board, said matching students with work that fits their interest, like is happening with Thiaw, is ideal.

“That idea is the genesis of this program, that they need to work, they need to have some money, but it needs to be earned and still learn, right?” Campbell said. “It has to combine with their degree, so they get someplace at the end of it.”

It was 2004. A Honduran immigrant who’d arrived with her family in the late 1990s, she secured a slot at a local community college, but reality hit when a counselor revealed her first semester’s tuition: $700, up front.

“I didn’t have that kind of money,” Alvarado said. And her high school offered scant advice on how to pay for it. “So I started working,” first as a daycare assistant, then in a series of manufacturing jobs, all while raising two kids on her own.

Now 37, Alvarado works for , the manufacturer of those ubiquitous plastic Hefty cups.

But this fall, 19 years after she graduated from high school, she’s about to get a second chance at college, compliments of an unusual benefactor: her oldest daughter.

Alvarado’s first-born, Yolany Baltazar, is among the first beneficiaries of , an unusual experiment in college access. Like many “college promise” programs, it essentially offers a free ride to a bachelor’s degree, covering tuition and fees for students who graduate from high school and persist through college.

But in Baltazar’s case, there’s a difference: Once she made it through her first semester, Hope Chicago made the same life-changing offer to her mother.

It’s part of a “two-generation” approach to attacking poverty, said Janice Jackson, Hope Chicago’s CEO. She noted that many college access organizations that support low-income families often “tinker around the edges, instead of going to where we know we need to go: making sure that there is much more of a pathway to the middle class.”

Advocates say research shows that greater access for both groups increases parents’ earnings and encourages kids to stay enrolled long enough to graduate.

‘A different conversation’

If Jackson’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she spent four years, from 2017 to 2021, as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, the fourth-largest district in the U.S.

“The thing about Hope Chicago is [that] when you first hear about it, it almost seems too good to be true,” Jackson said. “And I think that’s the response that a lot of people have.”

Once they sit with the idea a while, she said, many begin to ask why it isn’t true everywhere. “Why don’t we have a system in place so that kids across this country, quite frankly, can continue their education, and that finances are not the biggest barrier to them?”

At the moment, Hope Chicago has agreements with just five city high schools, offering graduates and their parents free access to 28 colleges, most of them Illinois public four-year and community colleges, along with a handful of private institutions.

Students must gain admission based on their own academic achievements — Hope Chicago doesn’t ask colleges to change their admissions criteria. And the program has no GPA cutoff, so students remain eligible to continue as long as they’re enrolled in classes.

But those who drop out also make their parents ineligible — a bit of subtle, intra-family peer pressure to stay in the game.

“Students obviously can go if their parents don’t go, but parents cannot take advantage of this unless their child is enrolled in school full-time,” Jackson said. “So they have an incentive, right? If I’m a parent and I’m in school and things are working out, but my child wants to drop out, that’s a different conversation.”

She said Hope Chicago deliberately chose its five high schools for the greatest possible impact, working in buildings that had seen “decades of chronic disinvestment,” lower achievement levels and graduation rates.

The focus, she said, is on helping the entire school. “It’s really about making a big difference.”

Baltazar, 20, still remembers the day she learned about the program in February 2022, at an assembly at Benito Juarez Community Academy on Chicago’s west side.

She texted her mother to warn her to stay off social media until she could deliver the news herself, Baltazar said. “When she picked me up from school, she was like, ‘What have you got to tell me?’ I’m like, ‘Mom, we get to go to college debt-free!’”

Alvarado was dumbstruck. “I was really happy if she got the opportunity to go [to college], just herself or my kids,” she said. “But for me, it was a little bit hard to process.”

In a few years, Alvarado’s younger son, 16-year-old Adrian, also a Hope Chicago scholar, will be able to attend college for free when he graduates from Benito Juarez.

‘In the center of a tornado’

The program launched in early 2022, with a from two philanthropists, Pete Kadens and Ted Koenig. Jackson wants to raise another $1 billion over the next decade to expand it and make more families eligible.

Recent research shows that these more educated parents will almost certainly earn more money — about $4,000 annually, according to , even though many are already years into their careers. 

But multi-generational college enrollment not only benefits parents. It also has a significant “spill-over effect” on their children. One reason is obvious: Parental education is a strong predictor of whether a student will attend college. 

A recent study by City University of New York economist noted that children whose parents are college graduates are three times as likely to attend college themselves. Investing in multigenerational college-goers, he said, is “economically efficient.” 

When Hope Chicago came to Ajani Cunningham’s school, Johnson College Prep, in spring 2022, it was co-founder Kadens who told an assembly of students they’d be going to college for free. Cunningham’s mother, Yolanda White, was filming the moment with her mobile phone and began crying. But then Jackson, Hope Chicago’s CEO, joined Kadens onstage and told the parents they were also eligible for free college. “And then the uproar was, like, magnified a thousand times,” Cunningham recalled.

“It was almost like … what people describe as being in the center of a tornado,” White said. “I think [Kadens] broke my brain because I could not react. I just .”

But stunned as she was, she knew immediately what she would do with her good fortune: finish her culinary education.

The 50-year-old mother of five had earned an associate’s degree at the for-profit Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Chicago in 2014, which closed in 2017, part of a of for-profit closures. 

She studied to be a pastry chef and nutritionist and has spent the past few years running an online bakery called . She also created and teaches a handful of home economics and mentoring courses for Chicago Public Schools. 

White dreams of earning a bachelor’s degree and teaching people how to source and eat higher-quality, locally grown food, especially in so-called urban “food deserts.” She knows these issues firsthand: In the eight-year period when she and her five kids were homeless, White recalled, “I had to make $20 work” for a week’s worth of meals. “And they were never hungry.”

White plans to study at Kendall College’s Culinary Arts School in Chicago, but she’s holding off on enrolling for a year while she figures out how to cut back her hours at the district. She also needs to put the online bakery on hiatus.

“When someone presents the physical manifestation of a lifelong dream to you,” she said, “you kind of have to pay attention to that.”

Meanwhile her son will matriculate this fall at Loyola University Chicago, thanks to Hope Chicago, studying psychology while planning for law school and a career in civil rights law.

‘A different life’

The organization’s efforts unfold as the district faces an odd mixture of crisis and confidence: While Chicago Public Schools in 2022 boasted a record-high graduation rate of 83%, just one-fifth of high school students were reading and doing math at grade level, according to the . And nearly half of students missed at least 18 days of school.

Hope Chicago says its work is already having an impact: An April report by Belfield, the City University scholar, found that college enrollment rates averaged 74% — a 17% increase — in the organization’s first year partnering with the five schools.

The program is looking to expand — at the moment it serves about 4,000 students, and is fund-raising both publicly and privately with hopes of announcing more high schools in the future.

While the two-generation approach is unique, the program operates in the tradition of “college promise” programs that for nearly 20 years have guaranteed tuition-free access to higher education. The movement began in 2005, in , and now counts more than 300 programs in at least 32 states, according to the .

The offers Kalamazoo Public Schools graduates up to 100% of tuition and fees at in-state public universities and community colleges. A found that six years after high school graduation, students in the program had higher rates of college credential attainment — 46%, up from about 36% before 2005. 

While the researchers said making college free won’t necessarily ensure that more students enroll, they found that offering a “simple, universal, and generous scholarship program” can significantly increase educational attainment, especially among low-income students.

Last spring, Baltazar finished her first year at in Normal, Ill., about a two-hour drive south of Chicago. Studying biology and pre-dentistry, she spent much of her freshman year adjusting to dorm life.

Baltazar had the advantage of bunking with a friend she’d known since middle school. She made new friends by simply leaving the dorm room door ajar and playing music.

Meanwhile, her mother is putting the finishing touches on an application to attend , an online program, in August. She plans to study finance while keeping her job at Pactiv Evergreen, and still can’t get over her good fortune — or her daughter’s. 

“I think just the idea of her going to school without any debt, and including myself, is just like …” She paused for a second. “In four or five years, this is just a different life.”