A record year for Tennessee Promise

The Tennessee Commission on Higher Education announced Monday that the Tennessee Promise program has registered a record number of applicants — more than 670,000 — from the class of 2025. The program, launched in 2015, is a free, last-dollar tuition scholarship for college students community in the state. .

When the Tennessee Promise application period ended on Nov. 1, the program received about 700 more applications than last year.

“We are pleased to see this level of interest and commitment from the Class of 2025,” said Steven Gentile, executive director of the Tennessee Commission on Higher Education, in a press release. “The enthusiasm these students show for higher education reflects the success of the Tennessee Promise and the growing drive to make postsecondary opportunities a reality for all Tennesseans.”

The commission also came out with it annual report on student demographics and program outcomes, which revealed other benchmarks. Notably, the 2022–23 cohort had the highest retention rate since the program began: 83.8% of students earned credentials or remained enrolled from fall to spring, a 2.5 percentage point increase over the previous The report also found that about 18 percent of Tennessee Promise students in the 2023-2024 cohort enrolled in technical colleges or Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology for the first time, the highest share of any cohort.