The New Hampshire Promise, recently announced by the University System of New Hampshire (USNH) and starting with the 2027 academic year, will allow all incoming undergraduate students who live in New Hampshire with a combined family income of under $100,000 to attend any institution in USNH. Similarly announced on Oct. 14, the Community College System of New Hampshire (CCSNH) tuition-free program, The Community College Promise Program, will be available to N.H. residents that meet the same criteria starting in the 2028 academic year. The announcement of these programs left a bittersweet taste for me.
I can appreciate the importance of this policy shift and the opportunities this will offer to the young folks of N.H. All forms of higher education have gotten exponentially more expensive since 2000 for a myriad of reasons: inflation, decreases in state/federal funding or the increased commodification of education and all parts of the economy. This will give many working-class New Hampshirites the leg up they need to make degrees and the skills necessary for good careers attainable. I hate to feel cynical about intent, but that cynicism only feels more justified as I see response from Governor Kelly Ayotte.
Programs like the New Hampshire Promise are a long time coming, while trying to remedy self-inflicted problems. The State of New York had similarly implemented the Excelsior Scholarship in 2017, giving those same opportunities to residents of the N.Y. that attend a State University of New York (SUNY), the City University of New York or community colleges in the SUNY system.
Lagging 10 years behind SUNY is unfortunate when N.H. politicians and bureaucrats with USNH lament an ‘enrollment cliff.’ This over concerns the decline in college enrollment and misdiagnoses of the problem. The issue of declining enrollment could have been more speedily remedied with actual relief in the ballooning cost of college and university. There seems to be this attribution of declining enrollments to lack of enthusiasm for education, which seems to be patently false.
In 2020, when Vermont announced its $5 million scholarship program in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was working in Vt. as a Licensed Nurse Assistant. The scholarship offered to cover tuition for students enrolled in nursing programs in the Vermont State Colleges System. That scholarship program was so successful on rollout, there was local news reporting from VTDigger and Valley News (which I would thumb through when residents at my assisted living home were done reading) that the Vermont State Colleges System had received so many applicants, there was a need for $2.4 million in additional funding to cover all applicants, including those on the waiting list.
This is not a strange problem for the United States or N.H.; funding for public education on all levels in N.H. is abysmal at best, with an estimated 72% of K-12 education funding in N.H. coming from local property taxes according to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute. The problem is money; it always has been and it always will be. More funding is imperative to making sure we can maintain and expand strong public education systems in N.H. and it feels as though any positive press Ayotte takes from the rollout of the New Hampshire Promise program is just laundering her terrible record on education funding over all. However, I am very pleased to see N.H. be the next state to offer a tuition-free scholarship program and make hopeful progress toward college affordability, even if the issues were self-inflicted.
Timothy Fitzpatrick can be contacted at
tfitzpatrick@kscequinox.com
