Nora Caplan-Bricker is a staff writer at The New Republic.

When the anonymous wealthy donors behind the Kalamazoo Promise made their pledge in 2005 to pay for the kids of Kalamazoo to go to college, the idea was shockingly novel. And very appealing: almost instantly other cities around the United States clamored for their own such programs. Eight similar scholarship plans were announced within a year of Kalamazoo’s. Today, the tally of plans inspired by the experiment in Southwest Michigan has topped 30 nationwide.

The idea is so attractive for cities looking to both upgrade their education credentials – and enhance their appeal to families who might otherwise not live there – that it’s given rise to several waves of copycats. The New Haven Promise started in 2010; now, it’s inspired a program in nearby Hartford, Conn., with Providence, R.I., and Newark, N.J., now considering plans of their own. El Dorado, Ark., is the South’s version of an idea incubator; it took up Kalamazoo’s cause in 2007 and has since been spreading the word; director Sylvia Thompson, advised Arkadelphia, Ark., on the program it founded in 2010, and met with a group from Malvern, Ark., last fall. These days, she’s also ushering along Shelby, N.C., and Tyler, Texas. “Kalamazoo was very helpful to us,” Thompson told me. “By the same token, I get phone calls all the time.”


Now, nearly a decade after the movement began, here’s how some of the country’s most prominent promise programs are tailoring and tinkering with their own versions of the idea.

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El Dorado Promise

The halls of the elementary schools in El Dorado are papered with posters that say “Promise Bound!” and “We’re working on the Promise.” Stroll through, and you might hear a kindergarten teacher chant, “The El Dorado Promise says?” and a roomful of five-year-olds calling back, “I can go to college.”

“It’s just part of the culture,” said Thompson. She keeps an office in El Dorado’s high school, where students call her “the Promise lady.” The El Dorado Promise kicked off in 2007, and it’s among Kalamazoo’s most faithful copycats; the only major difference is El Doradans can take their Promise funding anywhere in the country, where Kalamazoo graduates must go to one of Michigan’s public colleges. El Dorado is also considered one of the most successful Promises. Thompson said roughly 90 percent of the district’s students end up qualifying for the scholarship. An ongoing study at the University of Arkansas has found that El Dorado students who were in third grade when the program was announced were outperforming peers in other school districts by 14 points in math and 12 points in literacy on the Arkansas Benchmark Exam four years later. El Dorado’s high school drop-out rate, which was nearly double the state average at 8 percent in 2006, is now between 1 and 2 percent.

Former President Bill Clinton congratulates the 2012 graduating class of El Dorado High School. | AP Photo/The El Dorado News-Times, Michael Orrell

Like most Promise programs, El Dorado was sparked by an article about Kalamazoo: An account in the Wall Street Journal found its way to the deepest pockets in town, the Murphy Oil Corporation, which put up $50 million to start the program. “They wanted people to want to come to work for Murphy,” Thompson told me, “and a strong school system is one of the things people look for.” One El Dorado school even changed the lyrics of an old religious hymnal from “standing on the promises of Christ my King” to “standing on the promises that Murphy has given me.”

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Say Yes Syracuse

In 2008, Say Yes to Education, a national non-profit focused on inner cities, decided to experiment with a citywide scholarship program in Syracuse, New York. The organization—and others, like the New York City-based “I Have a Dream” Foundation—had been working on smaller-scale projects for years to boost access to higher education. A few years after it decided to initiate the Syracuse plan, the group began trading stories with the folks in Kalamazoo.

Unlike the Kalamazoo Promise, where scholarships are the defining component, Say Yes tackles an array of barriers that can keep low-income students from going to college: According to its president, Mary Anne Schmitt-Carey, the organization provides everything from tutoring to health clinics. “My experience is that a scholarship alone will not get the job done,” she told me, noting that the Kalamazoo team—which visited Syracuse to gather ideas—had come to a similar conclusion.

When Schmitt-Carey in 2011 announced a second citywide program, in Buffalo, New York, she borrowed Kalamazoo’s provision that a full college scholarship is awarded to only those students who arrive as kindergartners (a sliding scale determines the percentage of college funding students receive if they arrive between first and ninth grades, after which new students are ineligible for a scholarship). She had noticed that this detail made a big difference in the urban revival of Kalamazoo: It encouraged young families to put down roots in the city, rather than simply move there to cash in on the scholarship. In Syracuse, families were moving downtown when their children neared the tenth grade cutoff, but in Buffalo, the influx of families started when their children were much younger, which, she says, helps to rebuild neighborhoods.

New Haven Promise

As these free-college programs have multiplied, a debate has taken shape: whether to set a minimum grade-point average for qualifying students. Proponents say such a provision pushes school districts to focus on student performance, and ensures that students who receive a scholarship are ready to use it. Critics argue that it limits the pool of scholarship recipients to kids who would have made it to college anyway—often, to students from more affluent families.

Perhaps the most demanding promise program is the one based in New Haven, Connecticut, which is funded by the city’s biggest employer, Yale University. The scholarship requires a student to earn a minimum 3.0 GPA. The program is also the only one that requires community service—40 hours over the course the course of a high schooler’s four years—which executive director Patricia Melton called “the gem of the program.”,

“It just seemed natural to us that there should be some citizenship and some academic requirements,” said Bruce Alexander, who handles Yale’s relationship with New Haven and was part of the team that negotiated the scholarship program, adding that Yale “naturally gravitates toward those values.”

But when Melton took charge in 2012, she noticed that the grade requirements introduced problems too. “Let’s say a student has a difficult freshman year” that puts a 3.0 average out of reach, she said. “Anything could’ve happened—they could’ve become homeless. They’ll just check out and say, ‘I can’t make it.’” So Melton introduced what she calls the “Passport to Promise,” through which seniors graduating with a GPA between 2.5 and 2.99 can argue their case in an essay and receive $1,000 for the first year of college. If they maintain a 2.0 GPA, they then earn the full scholarship as sophomores.

Even so, New Haven Promise funds a relatively small percentage of graduating seniors. Last year, Melton said, a little more than half of eligible New Haven students applied, and 20 percent ultimately took scholarships.

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Pittsburgh Promise

According to Saleem Ghubril, executive director of the Pittsburgh Promise, people who worry about minimum GPAs “are selling short our minority kids.” The program he directs features a 2.5 GPA requirement with a “grace period” that extends down to 2.0. About three-quarters of graduates are eligible for the scholarship, and about half are using it, he told me. More than 40 percent of the recipients have been African-American and more than 80 percent of the scholarships have gone to students from low-income families.

A Pittsburgh Promise scholarship recipient during his 2009 graduation from Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, Penn. | AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar

But Pittsburgh’s school system, like many with Promise programs, faces some challenge still: In 2012, the latest year for which data is available, the Pittsburgh schools graduated only 69 percent of students. That’s up 7 percent since the Promise program launched in 2006, but nowhere near the 80 percent goal that Ghubril has set. So, like their counterparts in Kalamazoo, the organizers of the Pittsburgh Promise are doing more to put students in position to take advantage of the scholarship. When kids aren’t graduating from high school, covering college tuition, he said, “is not a panacea.”