Tennessee Promise Improves for Year Two

The first year of the Tennessee Promise was a success, but not without challenges. State officials are addressing those issues as the program offering free community college education begins its second year.

More than 16,000 students were enrolled in the program last fall and 80% stayed with the program through the spring semester. The number of students who applied for Tennessee Promise scholarships for the 2016-17 school year increased to nearly 60,000, according to a report in The Tennessean.

The most significant change will deal with how federal aid is distributed to students. Filing rules for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) have been relaxed by the corporation responsible for overseeing the financial parts of the Tennessee Promise. In addition, new federal guidelines allowing students to use more accessible tax data to complete the form go into effect in the fall.

“This is going to change things dramatically for this program, in a good way,” said Mike Krause, executive director of Tennessee Promise. “FAFSA and the FAFSA verification process represent a hurdle for students, particularly low-income students.”

Communications are being ramped up to provide more information and support for students in the program. Officials also plan to introduce the Tennessee Promise to eighth-graders across the state. In addition, colleges are hiring more support staff for students in the program and some professors are using a more team-project-style approach to their classes to encourage greater participation from the Tennessee Promise students.

An observation on stores, libraries and IT

I made an observation recently at the ALA meeting during a panel for SPARC/ACRL. It is one I have made before, but this time I have gotten a few comments back, so I thought it might be worth sharing more broadly. Having experience in academic IT, libraries, and college stores, I have observed that these three groups have some very common interests and overlap. There is a challenge to our working together effectively though. That challenge is a conflict in values. Put in its simplest and most sterotypical form, that conflict of values plays out as follows:

- Libraries want to give everything away for free
- IT departments want to control access to everything
- College stores want to charge for everything

These fundamental value differences and stereotypes (based somewhat in reality) make it difficult for these three groups to come together to work on collaborative solutions for the benefit of the whole. The days of stovepipes in higher education must necessarily come to an end, however. That means we must find ways to overcome weaknesses or leverage the opportunities that come from these distinctly different value systems -- and the resulting skills and biases that come with them. As some institutions are finding, there is great advantage to be realized for students in doing so.

Does your campus have a group that meets regularly to discuss the future of digital content on campus? Does that group include the above three stakeholder groups, plus faculty, students, and others? What is your campus strategy for the transition to digital?

Twittering from the road...

Hi folks.

Yesterday and today I am at the OReilly Tools of Change (TOC) conference. I had planned to blog parts of the conference, but yesterday's Blackberry outage put some end to that. See, even tech guys can get stymied by tech now and again.

Yesterday's TOC sessions were great. Many stores could have benefitted from some of the sessions. Over the next week I will post a number of my notes and observations from the conference. Right now I have about 30 pages of notes and a number of ideas and thoughts to include in upcoming presentations.

Some quick-hit themes to perk your interest: the importance of experimentation keeps coming up, as does varying incarnations of Web 2.0 and collaboration. The concept of community and how that figures into the equation has raised several ideas and implications for college stores. There was a great session on e-textbooks yesterday that will be repeated today due to popular and high demand -- something that stores should take away as an important indicator of what is to come. There are other themes and topics too-- but that will have to wait until a future posting. I will verify that this "posting from the road" arrived correctly and then perhaps begin a new posting from the train home tonight. I have lots of good content to post over the next few days.

Have you seen anything interesting lately? Any news stories you would like me to discuss or post more on here? I have another posting coming on clickers suggested by a reader. More to follow-

Happy blogging--
M