The Promise of Free Education Is Alive and Well
Despite Pandemic Ups and Downs,
the SBCC Promise Still Delivers
By Leslie Dinaberg | November 10, 2022
Read all of the stories in our “Schools of Thought 2022” cover here.
It’s been six years since the Promise program began providing regional high school graduates the opportunity to attend Santa Barbara City College full-time, free of charge, for up to two years. With the pandemic throwing all kinds of curveballs into the higher education system, we asked SBCC Foundation CEO Geoff Green for an update on what’s going on with the program today.
“The Promise still remains the best thing since sliced bread,” says Green, with his characteristic enthusiasm. He’s got the data to back it up: “almost 6,500 students and families have taken advantage of it in these first six years, so the Promise is absolutely having the impact that we were hoping for when we launched in 2016.”
At that time, after crunching the data from the region’s K-12 districts, 1,345 students per cohort was the estimate. “So we figured we’d have somewhere between 1,300 and 1,400 students at a time once it was fully up and running,” says Green. “By 2019, we actually were at 1,700 students, so it was even more attractive than we’d initially projected. … But once COVID hit and everything pivoted to online, and childcare and other things were shut down at schools, and jobs were lost, we dropped all the way down to 1,100 students. So there was a major impact there. We saw nearly a 35 percent drop in participation enrollment in the Promise.”
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