The Tennessee Reconnect helps more adults attend a community college or technical college and complete a postsecondary degree or credential, tuition-free. All Tennessee adults who do not already have an associate or bachelor degree are eligible to attend community college or technical college tuition-free starting in the fall of 2018. Tennessee Reconnect is a strategic component to achieving goals of the Drive to 55. At least half the jobs in the state will require some post secondary education by 2025— and attracting future employers depends on a highly-skilled workforce. While our state is making great strides in increasing the number of high school students who enroll in college, we cannot meet the full job market demands without engaging and supporting more adult learners. Tennessee is the first state in the nation to offer tuition-free community or technical college to adults. The Drive to 55 Alliance is helping lead the charge for Tennessee Reconnect through increased private-sector awareness, ownership and support for the long term steps to prepare our workforce and state for the future.
Update on Progress: Tennessee’s higher education performance can be assessed with cautious optimism, summed up by a prominent business leader who stated, “We are making a lot of progress at a very fast rate, but we’ve still got a long way to go.” With steady improvement in NAEP scores and climbing high school graduation rates, Tennessee has seen progress where many states have not. "The Drive to 55 campaign has succeeded in unifying goals among higher education stakeholders, and the Tennessee Promise has influenced various policy innovations." - Quote from Driven to Perform: Tennessee’s Higher Education Policies & Outcomes A Case Study by Joni E. Finney and Elaine W. Leigh Roman Ruiz, Wendy Castillo, Edward Smith, and Daniel C. Kent Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. Read the April 2017 Report.
Details: AcademyOne provides Tennessee with a multi-institutional portal and content management system. The portal includes institutional publishing tools, credit estimator and prospective degree audit enabling students to consider finishing a degree at one of the State's institutions. We also power Tennessee's Reverse Transfer System that automates the outreach, opt-in and prospective degree audit processing saving the institutions thousands of hours of time.
Resources: Case Study ♦ ArticulatED Data Sheet ♦ AwardED Data Sheet
TNRECOnNECT Website