Despite suggestions earlier in the Legislative session that lawmakers could phase out the Oregon Promise grant, which covers community-college tuition for Oregon high school graduates regardless of family income, it appears the grant will only be modified for now, not ended.

The Senate Education Committee on Tuesday voted to impose an income cap, limiting eligibility to students whose families make under $100,000, and use leftover promise funds for other community college financial aid.

Sen. Michael Dembrow, a Portland Democrat and chair of the Senate Education Committee, said lawmakers who participated on a task force studying college success raised the idea of ending or modifying the promise program after hearing from students that not being able to afford college was a chief barrier to their success. The Oregon Promise grant, unlike other need-based aid, is not focused exclusively on low-income students and awards a disproportionate amount of money to middle and high-income families.

“It just became really clear to us that we need to make sure that our student focused financial support was going to those who had the most need,” Dembrow said. “The promise, I think, was an ambitious notion that has not really played out.”

Oregon Promise was established in 2015, as an attempt to increase community college enrollment by letting middle and high school students know they’d pay no tuition if they earned good grades and went straight into an associates or certificate program after high school. But college enrollment has not markedly improved in the years since, The Oregonian reported this spring. The grant has only minimally improved community college affordability, and it hasn’t created widespread improvements in community college outcomes — though some individual schools have seen more promising results.

Backers of the promise program argue that the grant is a useful tool for helping middle-income families who don’t qualify for need-based aid but still struggle to pay for school.

“The Oregon Promise helps middle-class kids. No one needs to apologize for that,” Mark Hass, a former Beaverton lawmaker who helped establish the Oregon Promise said in an email earlier this year. “Middle-class working families pay the bulk of taxes in Oregon. And the majority of them are caught in this conundrum of making too much money to qualify for financial aid, yet not enough to keep up with the soaring costs of higher education.”

Currently, students with family incomes over $100,000 make up only 25% of Oregon Promise recipients, but they get closer to 40% of the program funds because of the way the grant is distributed, according to testimony from Kyle Thomas, director of legislative and policy affairs for the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission.

The promise grant covers community college tuition after other sources of financial aid are taken into account — meaning that low-income students who get more need-based financial aid from the state and federal government receive smaller Oregon Promise awards. The lowest income students receive a minimum of $2,000 from the grant, while higher-income students can receive up to $4,128 per year.

Dembrow said lawmakers have decided not to phase out the promise completely “while we have broader discussions around financial aid.”

Higher education advocates have called for a drastic increase in Oregon’s financial aid spending, but that looks unlikely to happen this year.

Oregon awards about $700 in financial aid per full-time student, far lower than the national average of closer to $1,000 nationwide. Neighbor state California allocates about $1,100 per full-time student and Washington awards more than $1,700.

Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission proposed an ambitious $780 million spending increase to make Oregon a leader in student aid. Gov Tina Kotek instead proposed a more modest $100 million increase in the Oregon Opportunity Grant, which is need-based aid for the lowest income students.

A budget framework from the co-chairs of the Legislature’s Joint Ways and Means Committee instead recommends keeping funding levels closer to where they are now, adding $28.8 million to keep the Opportunity Grant as is.

Dembrow, who is on the Ways & Means education subcommittee, said he will work to preserve Kotek’s proposed Oregon Opportunity Grant increase and sustain funding for the Oregon Tribal Student Grant, which pays for higher education for indigenous students.

If lawmakers approve the $100,000 income cap for the Oregon Promise called for in Senate Bill 262, the Higher Education Coordinating Commission can use leftover funds to help community college students who don’t qualify for the somewhat restrictive Oregon Promise, which requires students to enroll in community college immediately after high school.

“We really do appreciate adding the flexibility so that we can serve adult students and not just pipeline students,” John Wykoff, deputy director of the Oregon Community College Association, testified at Tuesday’s hearing.

Alanah Reese, a first-year promise recipient at Central Oregon Community College, says she’s also in favor of a pot of funding that could help cover costs for community college students who don’t come straight from high school.

But she worries that an income cap on Oregon Promise could hurt other students. Reese doesn’t think the cap would impact her eligibility for the grant, but she has more affluent friends who rely on the grant but might be cut off.

“It takes away the opportunity for other people to further their education,” Reese said of the income cap. “Lawmakers don’t recognize that even if a family generates a healthy income, that income has to be spread out across a year as well as the amount of children (and) expenses that a family may have.”