Caitlin McLawhorn could nev­er have gone to col­lege, she says, without the free tu­ition she re­ceived to at­tend com­munity col­lege first and to earn an as­so­ci­ate’s de­gree.

Grow­ing up as the daugh­ter of a single moth­er, money was al­ways tight in McLawhorn’s house­hold in East Ten­ness­ee. Her fath­er left the fam­ily eight years ago, and her moth­er, who didn’t fin­ish col­lege, sup­por­ted her two chil­dren on her salary as a low-level of­fice work­er in Oak Ridge, out­side of Knoxville. Col­lege—even if it was a goal—seemed far away from the classrooms of McLawhorn’s rur­al high school.

But in 2010, McLawhorn’s guid­ance coun­selors told her about a pro­gram called Ten­ness­ee Achieves, which al­lows any loc­al high-school stu­dent to at­tend community col­lege for free. The only caveats? Stu­dents must main­tain a C-average and at­tend com­munity col­lege for con­sec­ut­ive semesters. They also must per­form eight hours of com­munity ser­vice each semester and meet regularly with a vo­lun­teer ment­or (usu­ally, a pro­fes­sion­al in the com­munity) who can help the stu­dent re­main on track.

McLawhorn filled out the ap­plic­a­tion and, by 2011, found her­self en­rolled in Pellis­sippi State Com­munity Col­lege in Knoxville, where she stud­ied lit­er­at­ure and even­tu­ally earned her as­so­ci­ate’s de­gree. “I would have had no chance to go without this pro­gram,” she says now, just months away from earn­ing a full-fledged bach­el­or’s de­gree. “It is so sur­real to achieve something that I nev­er thought I could in my life.”