Posted by Maica Pichler on October 30, 2015 at 9:53 AM
The Kalamazoo Promise turns 10 this year, and what a decade it has been!
In November of 2005, the Kalamazoo Promise was first announced. An anonymous group of donors pledged to cover the cost of tuition and fees at any one of Michigan’s 44 public colleges and universities for students graduating from the Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS) district. The goal of the Kalamazoo Promise was to incentivize student enrollment in local K-12 schools from an early age, increase college success for all students, and develop a more skilled local workforce.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on October 19, 2015 at 7:35 AM
Free college tuition was not even a topic in the 2012 Presidential campaign. My how times have changed for the better.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on October 01, 2015 at 8:07 AM
Ever since President Obama announced Americas College Promise, his plan to make community colleges tuition free, the debate and conversation about making colleges free has been building with many productive ideas coming forward. This month, the San Diego Community College District may have become the first community college district in the country to approve an endorsement resolution supporting these efforts to make a community college education more affordable. That is just one step of many that we need to take down the road to a future where a college education is expected, accessible and affordable for all young people in our country.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on September 21, 2015 at 11:00 AM
Many people are rightly focused on doing something about the scourge of student debt that is impacting the ability of an entire generation to get on with their lives. We at the Campaign for Free College Tuition commend those efforts, even as we focus on finding a permanent solution to the problem so no future generation ever has to be burdened by debt.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on September 17, 2015 at 7:00 AM
Join us in saying Congratulations to Say Yes Education on their newest partner community, Guilford County (NC)! With this exciting announcement, Say Yes to Education has successfully launched three community-wide Chapters by bringing together diverse groups of corporate, non-profit, and philanthropic organizations in their respective communities. Guilford County joins as the biggest partner yet with a 72,000 student school-system, bigger than that of San Francisco or Boston.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on August 19, 2015 at 11:06 AM
Our cause is gaining momentum: the free college tuition movement has taken the media by storm!
Just this past week Hilary Clinton unveiled her much anticipated plan for reforming how we pay for college.[1] A Democratic front runner, Clinton’s proposal uses Federal incentives to get states to reinvest into higher education. And Bernie Sanders has been able to keep a constant presence in the media, always touting free college education as one of his central platforms.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on August 12, 2015 at 7:54 AM
Richard Reeves, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute, recently took time out of his studies on economic mobility to pen an editorial lambasting the Kalamazoo Promise because “free college doesn’t fix everything.” His commentary was so wrong and uninformed that Bob Jorth, Executive Director of the Kalamazoo Promise felt compelled to respond. His response unfortunately didn’t get the same coverage, but it was so well done that we felt all of our followers who might have been equally outraged by the Reeves hit piece should have a chance to read it in full. All we can say is, Bob, thanks for putting the record straight and Mr. Reeves in his place.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on July 29, 2015 at 1:05 PM
The Campaign for Free College Tuition hosted a conference call with the United States Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell and our President Morley Winograd to talk about President Obama’s proposal, “Americas College Promise”, to make Community College free throughout the country and CFCT’s 4-step plan for free college.
Ted Mitchell and Morley Winograd answered questions from members and listeners. They addressed a variety of concerns and issues including how to deal with a surge in enrollment, enforcement of the legislation, funding of the promise, bi-partisanship, support for HBCU’s and MSI’s, completion rates, worker training programs, universal access to education, and more.
Listen now to this exclusive call and leave us feedback if you have questions that weren’t answered!
Posted by Maica Pichler on July 13, 2015 at 11:00 AM
We owe much to Andrew Delblanco, a professor of Humanities and Director of American Studies at Columbia University, for his recent article “Our Universities: the Outrageous Reality.” The article, in the July 9, 2015 edition of the New York Review of Books, reviews six recent book releases on higher education. It also includes quite a bit of supplementary scholarship.
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