Columbus Promise college scholarship recipient Abdallahi Thiaw explains how he is building a chatbot as part of his internship with the Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio. (Patrick O’Donnell)

College promise programs offering “free college” to local students are increasingly adding a new task to their core mission — connecting young people to internships and apprenticeships.

The programs, in which students are promised free college tuition if they graduate high school, have long been considered a silver bullet against the soaring tuition and loan debt blocking many young people, particularly those who are low-income, from earning degrees and finding fulfilling careers.

But in the last few years, college promise programs from Kalamazoo to New Haven, Buffalo, Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, have realized that paying tuition alone doesn’t always achieve the ultimate goal of making lives better. So they have added staff and built partnerships with business to start internship, mentorship and apprentice programs that give “promise scholars” a start on career paths.

Further highlighting the shift, college promise advocates nationally will hold their fourth College Promise Careers Institute Nov. 8 and 9 at the University of Tennessee. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and First Lady Jill Biden will speak at the event, whose major topics include “Empowering Career Exploration and Pathway Discovery” and “Building the Promise Pipeline of Workers.”

“We’re quick to say ‘Go to college, get your degree,’ but you don’t have that follow up piece of what do you do after that?” said Jade Scott, who works with the Detroit Promise through the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce Foundation. “So many students get lost in the shuffle, like ‘I’m done with my degree, what do I do now? And this is where we really come in.”

“Now, we’re talking about how we get them employed,” Scott added. “What are we doing to support you, as you make that journey from these college classes into an actual career that you genuinely enjoy, or that’s making you money, or that’s offering you a sustaining lifestyle?”

Detroit Promise, with the help of the chamber, gave 450 students work experiences such as internships or job shadowing in the 2022-23 school year, Scott said.

The Kalamazoo Promise, perhaps the best-known promise program in the nation, considers the internship program it launched in 2022 so important it calls it “Higher Promise.”

Cetera DiGiovanni, Higher Promise coordinator, said parents previously kept asking if Promise officials knew of open jobs while businesses repeatedly asked the program for help finding talent.

“We know that kids are graduating and no one has jobs,” DiGiovanni said. “We thought we would be the mediator to bring them together.”

David Rust, executive director of Say Yes Buffalo, said the evolution is natural. Say Yes Buffalo, which started as a scholarship program in 2011, placed 25 students in apprenticeships in the fall of 2022 and another 25 this year.

“It stands to reason that there will be refinements, expansion of features, because we know a lot more now about what scholars and students need,” he said.

College promise programs began in the 1990s with individual philanthropists adopting single schools and pledging to cover college tuition for any student that graduated from high school and enrolled in college. Anonymous donors in Kalamazoo started a citywide promise program in 2005, then other promise programs like Say Yes to Education expanded from single schools in the 1990s to the cities of Syracuse and Buffalo, New York, Greensboro County, North Carolina, and finally Cleveland in 2019.

States like Tennessee have also added statewide promise programs as the ranks have swelled to more than 400 programs nationally. The programs differ in what colleges they pay for, with some covering only the local community college, some only in-state public colleges and others including private universities that choose to be partners with them.

But once lauded for wiping out the worries of tuition debt, promise programs have found that students, particularly low-income students, also need chances to test drive careers they think they might like. They need mentors in their field. They need workplace experience before graduating and seeking a full-time job.

Sometimes students simply need a paycheck while they are in school to pay for rent, commuting to class and meals, which promise programs rarely cover. Or they skip college altogether because class time takes away earning time they need to help their families.

“Free college can be too expensive for students,” said Rust. “A lot of our scholars, over 50 percent, have combined family income below $40,000. So, we’ve seen this more so than ever throughout the pandemic, you (students) do what you have to do, not necessarily what you want to do.”

There’s also benefit to the regional economy when students find careers that keep them in the city after college.

In Columbus, Ohio, where a pilot promise program pays for Columbus school district graduates to attend Columbus State Community College, companies such as Nationwide Insurance and gas and electricity supplier IGS Energy are eager to take on promise students in college as paid interns.

John Wharton, 19, a second year finance student at Columbus State, started work at IGS this fall helping manage and audit customer accounts for $18 an hour. Because he has an interest in marketing too, his supervisors are also trying to find chances to work in that department.

“It gives you a sense of feeling for what the real world is,” said Wharton, who had never had a job before the internship. “This gives people a platform to gain insight, whether or not they actually want to do what they’re studying.”

Abdallahi Thiaw, 20, also a Columbus Promise student, also just started as an intern this fall with the Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio for $20 an hour for 20 hours a week. Since he is earning an associates degree in interactive media, developing apps and programs that can be used on mobile devices, the board has him developing a chat program for its website that lets users find out what services the nonprofit provides.

“It’s a big opportunity for students like me, because a lot of job fields will tell you that once you graduate, you need experience,” said Thiaw. “But the main issue is nobody’s offering experience, so how are you going to get that experience? But with this program, it offers students like me experience and on top of that, you get paid great wages, which really helps us in focusing on school.”

David Campbell, director of communications for the board, said matching students with work that fits their interest, like is happening with Thiaw, is ideal.

“That idea is the genesis of this program, that they need to work, they need to have some money, but it needs to be earned and still learn, right?” Campbell said. “It has to combine with their degree, so they get someplace at the end of it.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

The new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) will launch in December, with both paper and online forms. (U.S. Department of Education)

Grand Rapids college placement advisor Sarah Zwyghuizen normally starts cajoling high school seniors in October to fill out the federal financial aid forms that are key to unlocking their chances of going to college.

Not this year.

A U.S. Department of Education delay in revising the forms known as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) means college advisors nationally will have to wait two months until December, or even after Christmas break, to start helping the 20 million students that typically apply.

It’s a delay that wipes out two months in which about half of applicants fill out the forms nationally. Deadlines have been extended, but the time until colleges announce financial aid packages and students must make decisions has been slashed. And it raises fears students needing extra attention — particularly low income students and families who are unaware how the financial aid process works — will be left behind.

Advisors like Zwyghuizen are preparing and bracing for a scramble in the new year to make sure they have multiple chances to nudge students to apply and walk families that need extra help through the process. Many students don’t believe they can afford college and need repeated prodding to apply and find out.

“There’s fear of the unknown going into this later and with less preparation than we did before,” said Zwyghuizen, who works for the Grand Rapids Promise, which helps pay tuition for students in a city where a third of children live in poverty. “There’s already so many barriers people have with FAFSA.”

Bill DeBaun, a director of the National College Attainment Network, said he has “real concerns” college access will drop, particularly for low-income students and those who would be first in their families to go to college.

“The outreach to these students, the helping them understand that college is for them is what takes time and energy on top of actually completing the FAFSA,” he said.

FAFSA determines eligibility for federal Pell grants for college expenses of up to $7,400 this school year. It is also the starting point for almost every need-based financial aid system in the country.

But with more than 100 questions asking for detailed financial information from families, it’s complicated and can scare some families off, particularly those who have not used them before.

“It’s the graveyard for so many college students,” said Tom Harnisch, vice president of government relations for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

The “cumbersome” process and “outdated technology” on the current form means “far too many are locked out of aid,” Richard Cordray, chief executive officer of the U.S. Office of Federal Student Aid said earlier this year.

The new forms, ordered by the FAFSA Simplification Act that Congress passed in 2020, will cut the number of questions more than in half. And applying will be even easier online if parents let the application import their tax filings.

The new forms will be accompanied by new aid formula that could help some families but hurt others. Though more students may be eligible for aid and expected family contributions could fall for many, the formula no longer accounts for siblings also going to college and there is debate over how the value of family land or small business assets are weighed.

The department has said for months the new forms will be available in December, but hasn’t clarified if that will be early or late December, when holidays will slow completion.

That delay is of immediate concern to a dozen national associations of colleges and counselors who wrote U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona earlier this month urging him to set a release date as soon as he can, so they can plan their completion campaigns.

“Because the timeline for completing the FAFSA will be much shorter than it has been in recent years, every day counts when it comes to supporting students and families through the new process,” the letter said.

• Read more: Q&A: Stanford economist Eric Hanushek on COVID’s trillion-dollar impact on students

Harnisch, whose organization is one of the dozen, said he hopes advisors can start working with families before Christmas.

“We’ve told them that December 1 and December 31 are quite different for us,” Harnisch said.

In cities like Grand Rapids, Zwyghuizend said, counselors are planning to jam the one-on-one meetings with students they normally spread out over the fall into just January.

“It’s going to be a lot of work in the second semester to try and get people ready at the last-minute,” she said.

Others are focusing this month on a key initial step to completing the new forms — creating log-ons and IDs in the online system — that they can do now and avoid having to start from scratch in January.

• Read more: Gen Z’s declining college interest persists — even among middle schoolers
  

In Cleveland, advisors have set four workshops just to create IDs between October and December. They are also planning intense family outreach in January.

“We believe that our ‘prework’ now will help keep parents and students engaged around FAFSA and financial aid,” said Alison Bibb-Carson, spokesperson for CollegeNow, the nonprofit that handles college advising for the city’s schools. “We hope that this work and our extended outreach will keep numbers the same or maybe increase the number of FAFSA completion.”

Cyekeia Lee, executive director of the Detroit College Access Network, is also banking on advance work and setting FAFSA IDs now will help students in that high-poverty city connect to aid they need.

“So as long as you take that first initial step to get them the most prepared that we can, we will work with that,” Lee said. “As long as families start to work on the FSA ID I think you’ll still get enough traction once it comes out.”

The 74’s Linda Jacobson contributed to this story.

Students and young adults in Los Angeles have mostly built a tiny house this summer as part of the new Los Angeles County Skilled Trades Summers program. Students learn construction and other trade skills while also being paid like in a normal summer job. (Courtesy of Harbor Freight Tools for Schools)

Marco Chavez presses a foot-long piece of bare wooden siding into a gap along a window and pulls the trigger on his drill.

Chavez, 17, a recent graduate of College Bridge Academy, a charter high school in the city of Compton in Los Angeles County, steps back and nods while his instructor watches him.

This “tiny house” on top of cement blocks in the parking lot of the non-profit Los Angeles Education Corps. is coming along nicely, as is the construction training of Chavez and more than a dozen classmates in the group’s summer program for youth.

This five-week paid program is one of five projects serving more than 200 county youth, many in charter schools or academic recovery programs, in the Los Angeles County Skilled Trades Summers program, which is privately funded by Harbor Freight Tools for Schools, a program of the Smidt Foundation.

The sites, which teach skills ranging from solar panel installation to welding, to auto repair, are all efforts to at least nibble away at a skills gap facing Los Angeles and the nation by teaching students introductory skills that businesses are craving.

Students earn a paycheck on par with typical summer retail, fast food or camp counselor jobs and leave with marketable skills, references and often industry credentials.

There has been a national push in recent years to highlight a shortage of people with Career Technical Education, formerly known as vocational training. Several training models like apprenticeships and internships — and even a hybrid called “apprenternships” — have sprouted across the country to fill that gap. Summer jobs that align with potential careers are another promising option.

Kendra LaRose, who organizes Chavez’s lessons, said she wants to give students who might not be able to study trades at their high schools a chance to earn skills and certifications that can land them better jobs. Even students that decide to go to college instead of construction, she said, still gain useful skills in the program and learn what employers expect in the workplace

“I want to help them be productive in their communities, and be hired for work in their communities,” she said. “Some of them do this (as a career). Some decide it’s not for them. But what the takeaway is, you learn what it means to work a job.”

The Skilled Trades Summers program, now in its second summer, is just one of several training efforts for young people. Though still small — just 200 students in a county of 10 million people — it meets two key criteria for helping low-income youth: competitive wages and teaching valuable skills.

Unlike volunteer summer internships that only help the affluent, the program pays the area’s minimum wage of $16 an hour; and avoids making students pick between training for the future and helping families pay immediate bills.

Students also learn skills employers need, often earning industry certifications and benefitting from lessons on workplace communication and etiquette.

Marco Chavez, 17, has gained an appreciation of construction trades in his summer with the LA County Skilled Trades Summers program and is now weighing whether to become a contractor. (Harbor Freight Tools for Schools)

Chavez, the son of Mexican immigrants, plans to attend community college this fall to study software engineering, he said he chose this program to have career options and because the skills might help him personally.

“Like if something were to mess up in my own house, you know, it’d be something that I know how to fix,” he said.

After several weeks of building this tiny house and trying out carpentry, plumbing and electrical work, he’s considering building on these lessons to become a general contractor.

“I grew a liking to it, and the skills I learned from it,” he said.

Carlos de la Cruz, also 17 and also a 2022 graduate of the same high school, said most of his friends are working retail jobs this summer, but he’d rather be working with his hands. He said he has liked most skills he has tried this summer and will keep working in construction while he figures out a long range plan.

“I liked plumbing,” he said. “Also, like carpentry, finishing work…I don’t think there’s any part of it (I don’t like) other than, obviously, being in the hot sun, but that’s not so important.”

Dave Lefkowith, who is leading Harbor Freight’s training work in Los Angeles after working with a similar Louisiana program called Jump Start, said there is a real need for teaching more of these skills, but a challenge in expanding them in schools. The equipment and needed space are expensive, he said, other than at full Career Technical Education schools and the tasks need more time than a typical high school class period allows.

So he’s experimenting with mobile training labs at dedicated sites like in this summer program that have whole days to work with students without competing with academic classes.

“I think the best immediate potential for expanding high quality skilled trades training and education…rests in making better use of non-traditional times. non-traditional venues as well,” Lefkowith said. “Certain high quality outcomes are possible but outside of the normal school day, where the barriers to achieving the same accomplishments are very substantial.”

For standard construction trades, building a tiny house — an 8×15 sonoma shanty in the L.A. Education Corps. parking lot — fits the bill. It will eventually be moved for a still to be determined owner. For solar installation skills, students split training time between offices of the Grid Alternatives non-profit solar provider near downtown and Alliance for Community Empowerment offices in Canoga Park. Students also travel to two homes nearby that are receiving free solar panels to work with and observe GRID Alternatives employees installing them.

“They’re not working on a mock roof,” said Michelle Fuentes-Miranda, the Alliance’s founder. “The actual roof is an actual install. They get to see the family’s faces that are going to receive this gift.”

Students in the solar portion of the L.A. County Skilled Trades Summers program learn how to mount solar panels on roofs in classrooms first, as shown here from last summer, before they join professionals and help put them on real roofs. (Ben Gibbs/Harbor Freight Tools for Schools)

Even traditional school officials, who are ramping up their own efforts to connect students to trades, say more programs like this are useful. Esther Soliman, administrator of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s work experience department, said she has not yet learned details of the program, still in post-COVID infancy, but called it a “fantastic idea.”

“Construction is going crazy right now in the area,” she said. Helping kids learn about a possible career in a paid internship, she said, is a “win-win situation.”