About 300 CCRI students earn second tuition-free year

WARWICK — About 40 percent of students who received free college tuition in the first year of a new program in Rhode Island earned the scholarship for a second year, the Community College of Rhode Island said Tuesday.

Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo went to CCRI’s Warwick campus to visit with students who are benefiting from the program she created. Afterward, Raimondo and college officials discussed the new statistics.

Out of roughly 725 students who received the full Rhode Island Promise scholarship last year, about 300 met the criteria to get it again this school year, they said.

Overall, there has also been an increase in the percentage of students on track to graduate in two years, they added.

Twenty-two percent are on track, which is up from 6 percent in the 2016-2017 school year, according to the statistics. The college looked at all of the full-time students who entered CCRI straight from high school in 2017, which would include students who received the scholarship and some who did not. The college did not have a separate statistic for only the Rhode Island Promise students readily available.

Raimondo said that while it’s still early, she thinks the program will prove to be “the most successful intervention ever in America to increase graduation rates.”

“This is $3 million and we’ve nearly quadrupled the number of students who are on the path to graduate on time with a degree,” Raimondo said. “We know the single most important thing we can do to supercharge this economy is to have more highly-skilled people. And for that very modest amount of money, this is a huge success. It has exceeded my expectations.”