With free tuition to community colleges now available for adult Massachusetts residents 25 years-old and up, Reminder Publishing reached out to Holyoke Community College and Springfield Technical Community College to find out how they are preparing for potential influxes of new students on campus this fall.
Dubbed MassEducate, the program from the state is an attempt to increase the state’s workforce and to expand higher education opportunities for students across the state. MassEducate will see $75.5 million from the state’s fiscal year 2025 budget being spent to cover tuition and fees for residents. The program also offers a stipend for up to $1,200 for books, supplies and other costs to students who make 125% or less of median income in the state.
Holyoke Community College Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Mark Hudgik told Reminder Publishing the community college has already seen 2.5 times the number of applications they saw at this point before last school year.
“The day of the announcement, particularly the day after, our folks that work frontlines reported that they were getting a lot of phone calls and emails from students asking about free community college, and we’ve definitely seen an increase in applications,” Hudgik said. “It’s getting out there and folks are hearing about it.”
In preparation for a potential influx of new students, Hudgik said he and his team had been having conversations on how to handle this dating back to when they first heard about the potential of a free community college initiative from the state.
While there is naturally some concern on if they can meet all the registration needs and offer courses based on how many in total end up joining the student population, Hudgik said the major focus at the moment was making sure interested students are given quality advising from the school.
“We are trying to make sure that we’re providing good advising to students, because for many folks making the decision doesn’t necessarily take into account what changes need to happen in a person’s personal life to fit school in,” Hudgik said.
As far as hiring more faculty and staff, Hudgik added those options are on the table depending on the total amount of students new this fall. He said once they can settle in this fall with any new students attending thanks to free tuition, they will be better equipped to evaluate how their resources align with the addition.
Even with potential changes and adapting to more students coming to HCC, Hudgik said the opportunity for Massachusetts adults to receive free tuition from the school has brought another layer of excitement for the new school year.
“The pandemic saw a significant decrease in our enrollment overall, but also a big shift to online out of necessity. As we slowly identified what normal is going to be when coming back to on campus classes, I think folks are really excited to have this energy on campus, to have students on campus, to have campus life come back with clubs and organizations and athletic events,” Hudgik said. “All the things that come from people interacting with people, the growth that can happen, the connections that can be made, and the learning that we think will come from that so there’s definitely excitement about it.”
Springfield Technical Community College President John Cook is also excited about the program.
Cook said STCC has no working estimate or model for the number of people who may take advantage of the free tuition in the fall of 2024.
“Community college enrollment is notoriously hard to forecast,” he said, adding that 15-20% of students enroll in the two weeks before the semester begins. Whatever the increase, Cook said he is not concerned about STCC’s ability to accommodate the influx of students. MassReconnect, the program put in place in 2023 that allows adults over age 25 to attend community college free, prepared the college for what to expect. That program led to a 15% increase in the student population in fiscal year 2024 over the previous year. Prior to this, the college had been experiencing a decade of falling enrollment.
“We’re still not the size we were before the pandemic,” Cook said of COVID-19. Not all programs were affected equally by the coronavirus pandemic. He explained that there is plenty of capacity in programs such as cyber security and HVAC have plenty of openings, while the number of seats in the nursing program each semester has always been limited. About half of STCC’s classes are delivered online, further opening space for new in-person students.
STCC also has the faculty to teach additional course sections should they be needed.
“We did not reduce employees at the same proportion” as the number of students lost during COVID-19, Cook said. “We have over 70 different programs with different faculty [needs].”
The face of community college has also changed substantially in the past five years. STCC offers three academic schools — health, STEM and liberal arts and professional studies — and continuing education or workforce training offerings. While many students are fresh out of high school and pursue an associate’s degree full-time, 65% are part-time and many are returning to school after time away, what is commonly referred to as “non-traditional students.”
The way Cook sees it, “We really are the new traditional” model of higher education. “We do not have the type of in-person, on-campus, test taking that we had before the pandemic.” With the flexibility of this “new traditional” model and the ability to attend tuition free, Cook said, “It is an invitation to come to college.”
When asked if the cost of college is what has kept people from coming back to school in the past, Cook said the topic is more nuanced than that.
“We are the most affordable institution of higher learning in the city of Springfield,” he said, with an average cost of $15,000 to earn an associate’s degree. Nonetheless, he acknowledged, “For some, it may as well have been $50,000.”
In many cases, he said the move to tuition free will “cut through” issues that have kept students from pursuing a college education.
