This handbook is the product of close collaboration among a diverse group of researchers and support from the organizations and individuals listed below. The project is part of the Kresge Foundation’s CoPro 2.0 Initiative dedicated to shaping equitable and sustainable College Promise programs.
Who made this handbook?
Project Co-Directors
Michelle Miller-Adams is a senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and a professor of political science at Grand Valley State University. Miller-Adams’s research focuses on the local, state, and national movements toward tuition-free college. She is the author of The Path to Free College: In Pursuit of Access, Equity, and Prosperity (Harvard Education Press, 2021), Promise Nation: Transforming Communities through Place-Based Scholarships (Upjohn Press, 2015), and The Power of a Promise: Education and Economic Renewal in Kalamazoo (Upjohn Press, 2009), along with two other books. One of the nation’s leading experts on the tuition-free college movement, she speaks with local and national media and advises state policymakers and community stakeholders on their tuition-free college initiatives. She holds a BA in history from the University of California Santa Barbara, a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in political science from Columbia University.
Jennifer Iriti, research scientist and director of the Evaluation for Learning Group and co-director of the Partners for Network Improvement at the University of Pittsburgh, leads strategy, research, and evaluation initiatives for PK-20 education improvement efforts. Her team infuses field knowledge with practitioner expertise to support policymakers and practitioners in real-time decision making. Most recently, she has focused on programs that support broadening participation in postsecondary access and success, such as her work as external evaluator for the Pittsburgh Promise and as co-principal investigator for a $10 million, five-year NSF INCLUDES Alliance grant in which she and her team are designing a networked improvement community of precollege STEM programs to increase STEM college access and success for Black and Brown students. She holds a doctoral degree in developmental and educational psychology and a certificate in interdisciplinary policy and evaluation from the University of Pittsburgh.
Contributing Editors
Meredith S. Billings is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Sam Houston State University. Her research agenda focuses on college affordability, higher education finance, and college access and success for low-income, first-generation, and racially minoritized students. Currently, she is conducting research on the political dynamics of promise program designs and changes to institutional finances for community colleges with promise programs. Her dissertation examined the effect of promise programs on college access, persistence, and completion for nine promise programs in Michigan. She has published her promise program research in Improving Research-Based Knowledge of Promise Programs and New Directions for Community Colleges (American Educational Research Association, 2020). She also wrote a piece on promise programs for Brookings Institution’s Brown Center Chalkboard. She holds a BS in neuroscience from William and Mary, a master’s degree in higher education from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in higher education from the University of Michigan.
Celeste K. Carruthers is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, with a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research. Carruthers is also the editor-in-chief of Economics of Education Review and an advisory board member for the Career and Technical Education Research Network. Her research centers on education policy with crossovers into public economics, labor economics, and economic history. Recent and ongoing projects examine the effect of financial aid on college choices, career and technical education, and the consequences of segregated schools in the early 20th-century United States. She has published in leading economics journals, including Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Human Resources, and Journal of Public Economics. Her research on free community college was influential in the development of the Tennessee Promise, and she has written for the New York Times and the Brookings Institution on that topic.
Gresham D. Collom is a visiting researcher and adjunct faculty member with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. He deploys mixed methods to further the understanding of how policies are implemented, and how policy implementation influences student success in postsecondary education. While a doctoral student, Collom coordinated a state-supported longitudinal qualitative study on Tennessee Reconnect and adult student experiences as they returned to college. He has presented findings from this study nationally and recently published an article in Community College Review. Currently, Gresham is conducting several studies exploring promise programs. These projects are focused on the impact of mandatory mentoring in the Tennessee Promise, summer melt and early drop-out behaviors among Tennessee Promise students, and how public benefit programs impact adult college students’ postsecondary outcomes.
Denisa Gándara is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a 2021 recipient of the William T. Grant Scholars award, which funds a five-year study of racial equity in free-college program design. Her research agenda explores higher education policy formulation processes and impacts, especially on populations traditionally underserved in higher education. Her research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the Spencer Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Educational Research Association, among others. She serves as associate editor of the Journal of Higher Education. Gándara was recently selected by President Biden to serve on the National Board for Education Sciences. Gándara earned a BA from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD from the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia.
Douglas N. Harris is a professor and chair of the Department of Economics and the Schlieder Foundation Chair in Public Education at Tulane University, as well as the founding director of both the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans and the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. In addition to his three books and 100+ studies, Harris is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, which publishes his occasional blogs and reports, including The Promise of Free College (and Its Potential Pitfalls). He has advised governors in six states, testified in the U.S. Senate regarding college access, and advised the U.S. Department of Education, the Obama White House, and the Biden transition team on multiple education policies.
Brad Hershbein is a senior economist and deputy director of research at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and a nonresident fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. He has also served as the Institute's director of information and communications services. His fields of interest focus on labor economics, demography, and economics of education, and especially the intersection of the three. Hershbein has investigated how new high school graduates fare in the labor market during and after a recession, and how employers use the selectivity of school and GPA to infer the productivity of new college graduates. He has worked extensively on issues of higher education access and completion and subsequent labor market impacts, especially through evaluations of place-based college scholarships. His work has appeared in numerous academic journals and been covered in leading media outlets. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.
Amy Li is an assistant professor of higher education at Florida International University. Her research focuses on higher education finance and public policy, specifically performance funding, promise programs, student loan debt, state appropriations, and policy adoption. She studies the impact of local and state policies on college access and completion and is particularly interested in outcomes for historically underrepresented students. Li has written blog posts and reports covering her research on promise programs for the Conversation, the Campaign for Free College Tuition, and the Century Foundation. Her work has been funded by the American Educational Research Association, AccessLex and the Association for Institutional Research, and the Kresge Foundation. Li earned a PhD in educational leadership and policy from the University of Washington. She holds a master’s degree in higher education administration and a bachelor’s degree in economics and psychology from the University of Utah.
Danielle Lowry is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center. She is a recent graduate in education administration and policy studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She previously worked for a nonprofit at Kent State University that assisted nontraditional students with FAFSA completion and college admissions. She attended Ohio State University and completed a master’s degree in public administration while working for an organization that provided professional development opportunities to adult education instructors in Ohio. Her research focuses on financial aid policies and college access programs and their effect on college retention and completion.
Lindsay C. Page is the Annenberg Associate Professor of Education Policy at Brown University and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her work focuses on quantitative methods and their application to questions regarding the effectiveness of educational policies and programs across the preschool to postsecondary spectrum. Much of her work has involved large-scale experimental or quasi-experimental studies to investigate the causal effects strategies for improving students’ transition to and through college. She is particularly interested in policy efforts to improve college access and success for students who would be first in their family to reach postsecondary education. She holds a doctorate in quantitative policy analysis and master's degrees in statistics and in education policy from Harvard University. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College.
Bridget Timmeney is a consultant to the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and previously a long-term employee at the Institute in both the research and the employment management and services divisions. She assists with business and community alignment and strategic planning related to workforce development and the Kalamazoo Promise and works with other communities developing place-based scholarship programs. She has assisted in evaluations of state and local workplace literacy programs, developed community and regional benchmark indicators, was a key investigator on the Kansas City Scholars evaluation, and is part of the evaluation team for the Columbus Promise. She earned a master’s degree in social work in policy, planning, and administration at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Design
Handbook design by Allison McKenna
Animations by Veracity Media
Acknowledgments
We could not have developed the content of this handbook without the support, input, and guidance of the following organizations:
Thank you to the following individuals who provided feedback as this project was being developed: Lauren Burdette, Trevor Kubatzke, Jack MacKenzie, Bobby Mattina, Harris Miller, Trenton Moulin, Brian Newman, Doug Ross, John Tannous, Kevin Singer, Morley Winograd, and staff members of College Promise and the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.
We are also grateful to Upjohn Institute colleagues Katie Bolter, Allison Hewitt Colosky, Jill Gernaat, Kyle Huisman, Elizabeth Kellogg, and Jason Preuss for their contributions to this project.
Citation
Miller-Adams, M. and J. Iriti, eds. (2022). The Free College Handbook: A Practitioner’s Guide to Promise Research. W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. December