Mills' Free-College Plan Would Go Permanent but Drop Fee Coverage to Save $2.5M
The revised proposal would require a year of Maine residency and shorten the scholarship's completion window from four years to three.
Gov. Janet Mills visited Northern Maine Community College on Feb. 27 to promote her proposal to make community college tuition-free in Maine permanently, the Bangor Daily News reported.
The plan is part of the affordability agenda in her supplemental budget. The existing program covers tuition and fees for as many as two years for high school graduates, a benefit worth about $3,800 a year. It began in 2022 to help students whose schooling was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and was later extended to the classes of 2024 and 2025.
A revised version now before the Legislature is designed to cut the program's cost by $2.5 million a year. It would cover tuition but not fees, which run about $2,800, and would be limited to Maine students who have lived in the state for at least a year before enrolling. Students would also get three years instead of four to finish a two-year degree with the scholarship.
College President Doug Binsfeld said roughly half of the school's 600 students rely on the program, and he called the revisions "very modest changes."
During the visit, Mills toured the building construction shop and met with students in fields from welding to nursing. She also visited Presque Isle High School's Career and Technical Education Center, where $800,000 in upgrades were funded through the Maine Jobs and Recovery Plan.
This story was first reported by Bangor Daily News.
