Going to college and earning a degree was always part of Frances Heeren’s plan, even if that meant going into debt to do so.
After finishing high school in South Dakota, Heeren moved to Omaha with her mother and later enrolled at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is now a junior political science and ethnic studies double major.
Like millions of other college students pursuing higher education, Heeren took on student loans to cover the costs that wouldn’t be covered by federal aid or other scholarships with the understanding that she was investing in her own future.
But that didn’t make it any easier.
“I always planned on going to college no matter the price because I knew it was something I wanted to do for myself,” Heeren said. “But I live with a single parent, she’s a teacher, and it’s sometimes a struggle for us when it comes to finances.”
Then, in the middle of her first year on campus, Heeren learned that she qualified for the Nebraska Promise, a new program that offers free tuition to Nebraska residents from families with household incomes under $65,000.
The scholarship covers the cost of tuition above what federal Pell Grants or other financial aid pays for, meaning students like Heeren could potentially pursue a degree at minimal cost.
“The debt is so stressful,” Heeren said. “It was nice to be able to have some of that relief, and especially to have that burden taken off her (mother’s) shoulders.”
Getting out from underneath the weight of figuring out how to pay for college — even at a place like UNL, which is among the most affordable universities in the Big Ten Conference — opened new doors to Heeren.
She has maxed out her course load both during the fall and spring semesters and has enrolled in a full load during the summer sessions as well, and has expanded her extracurricular and off-campus opportunities as well.
Heeren joined the Model United Nations, has eyes on joining the Association of Students at the University of Nebraska, works as a legal runner at a law firm, and last spring was a page at the Nebraska Legislature.
That last opportunity, where she got to watch lawmakers on the floor and in committee, learn about the workings of government, and see advocacy groups and common citizens petition their leaders sparked a potential career interest.
“I was really interested in the legal process, but now I’m more interested in being active in my community on the civic side and helping with advocacy groups,” she said. “I feel very strongly about that. It kind of lit a fire to care about issues I didn’t know about before.”
Heeren credits the Nebraska Promise for helping make college more affordable and giving her the chance to pursue what have become passions.
“If I was under more of a financial burden, I might not have been able to do that,” she said.
Since the 2020-21 school year when it was first offered, some 18,000 individual Nebraska students have qualified for and received full tuition scholarships through the Nebraska Promise program across the NU system.
Students from each of Nebraska’s 93 counties have been awarded free tuition at NU’s campuses in Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney, as well as the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the Nebraska College for Technical Agriculture in Curtis.
In all, Promise students are more likely to come from areas of the state outside the Lincoln and Omaha metro areas.
And, according to university data, 53% of Promise students are first-generation students compared with just 25% of non-Nebraska Promise students, while recipients are also more likely to be students of color than non-recipients (55% are white, while 45% are students of color), and have scored lower on the ACT college entrance exam.
NU President Ted Carter, who announced the program in the spring of 2020 amid the backdrop of the COVID pandemic as a way to maintain access and affordability to higher education, said the current demographic of Nebraska Promise students are who the program was meant to help.
“Nebraska Promise is doing exactly what we set out to do: open the doors of higher education to more Nebraska students,” he said. “I am proud that through this program we have been able to create opportunity for so many young people and produce more talent for Nebraska’s workforce.”
While the Nebraska Promise is among hundreds of similar programs that have been started either by individual colleges and universities or initiated through legislation, the idea of providing full tuition to the students who need it most has a decades-long history in the Cornhusker state.
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Prior to the 2004-05 school year, the state-appropriated Tuition Assistance Program offered financial aid to students with demonstrated need to attend the University of Nebraska.
Then came Collegebound Nebraska, which provided free tuition to students from low-income families who qualified for a federal Pell Grant and met NU’s admissions standards.
Five years after Collegebound Nebraska began, and following an expansion to offer assistance to more Nebraskans, a total of 4,300 students were receiving aid to attend NU’s campuses. Now in its fourth year, Nebraska Promise is serving 7,500 students across the university system.
Justin Chase Brown, the director of scholarships and financial aid at UNL who helped develop the program that would be deployed across the entire NU system, said the biggest difference between Collegebound Nebraska and Nebraska Promise is where the income threshold was set.
Pell Grant eligibility is based on several factors, including the number of people in a household, how many family members are attending college, and the cost of attendance at the college or university the student planned to attend.
The threshold for Nebraska Promise was designed with simplicity in mind, Brown said. If a Nebraska family’s income is at or below $65,000 – it was originally set at $60,000 when the program started, while some universities have raised theirs to as much as $80,000 – a student can expect to receive aid.
“That made it easier for people to know if college was going to be affordable for them rather than waiting until their senior year to fill out the FAFSA,” Brown said. “You know how much your family makes, so you know whether you are in that range.”
The scholarship has proven to be a lifeline for students like Dalton Cooper, an advertising and public relations major, who said he had little hope of attending college after his family fell on hard times before learning that he qualified for Nebraska Promise.
“I didn’t have any image of the future, it was just me living in the moment,” Cooper said. “I didn’t expect I was going to get to further my education.”
As a high school senior in Nebraska City, Cooper said he set higher expectations for himself and eventually eyed enrolling in a community college before learning he could qualify for the Nebraska Promise from friends attending UNL.
Now a sophomore immersed in the four-year university experience, he works in the Husker Hub on campus connecting students like himself who may have come from less-than-ideal financial situations.
“It feels good to connect with other students who have gone through similar situations,” he said.
Providing free tuition scholarships in order to help Nebraska students like Cooper see a new path for their life — NU said the retention rate for students who participate in the program is 77%, which is slightly lower than the retention rate for non-Promise students — does come at some cost, however.
In its first five years, NU invested a total of $13.6 million into providing free tuition through Collegebound Nebraska. During the 2019-20 school year, NU spent a total of $12.7 million on the program.
The university invested $18 million in the first two years of Nebraska Promise in 2020-21 and 2021-22, a total of $19 million in 2022-23, and anticipates spending as much as $19.7 million in 2023-24.
The roughly $75 million spent on providing tuition assistance to Nebraska students to date comes from NU’s existing funding — no additional state appropriations have been approved for the program — which amid a $58 million budget shortfall means the university is redirecting resources into the program.
Still, NU sees the results as paying off and administrators and the Board of Regents have remained committed to the program. So far, more than 5,000 students who have received help through Nebraska Promise have earned an undergraduate degree or certificate from NU.
Carter, who will leave NU at the end of the year to become president at Ohio State University, said Nebraska Promise is exactly what “Nebraska public university should be doing for our state.”
“Our goal is for the University of Nebraska to be the destination choice for every student,” he said. “We will continue to look for ways to compete for all students, provide them with an unbeatable value, and graduate them on time to contribute to Nebraska’s economic competitiveness.”
Heeren is on track to graduate a year early next spring and said the Nebraska Promise has given her choices. She has the ability to choose the classes and pursue jobs that interest her, have more time to study, and build deeper connections on and off campus.
“Coming from a middle-income household, any aid like that is a gift,” she said. “It’s definitely improved my college experience for the better.”
University of Nebraska-Lincoln junior Frances Heeren credits the Nebraska Promise program, which grants free tuition to qualifying students, for giving her the chance to pursue her passions, along with a college degree.