When Doreisha Reed was in elementary school, she thought college was free for everyone. Her teachers spoke about it like it was an extension of high school, as if she had no other option but to attend. And when the teachers talked, they kept bringing up “the Promise.” “Until middle school, I thought everybody had it,” says Reed, now 18 and a recent Kalamazoo Central High School graduate headed to Western Michigan University. “But that’s when it hit me. Other kids have to pay for college.”

Kalamazoo, Mich., is different not just because its name sounds funny.

Since 2006, more than 5,000 students have been eligible for the Kalamazoo Promise, an $80 million investment from a group of anonymous local donors that allows every city student to attend an in-state college tuition-free. The initiative is so striking, it spurred President Obama to give his first high school commencement address at Kalamazoo Central in 2010. Visiting the city, it’s easy to see that the Promise has been about culture as much as tuition.

The notion of making public universities free has been revived this election cycle. But in many U.S. cities, it’s already happening from the ground up. More than 50 communities have some form of place-based tuition-free scholarships ...

In the mid-2000s, a group of wealthy donors began talking about “a big initiative” to turn the community around, and the discussion always came back to education, says Janice Brown, Promise’s executive director emeritus and the only person in direct contact with the donors. By 2005, they had decided to fund college tuition for all Kalamazoo graduates, a gift they hoped would create economic ripples across the region. When Brown announced the Promise that November, parents cried. Some thought it was a joke.

The Promise is not a panacea, however. While more grads are going to college, minorities account for too many of the Promise students who do not finish, with black and Hispanic students graduating at half the rate of whites. “The completion rates are still horrible,” says Bob Jorth, Promise’s current executive director. “But the donors understand this is a generational issue.” But the Promise has also spurred surrounding schools to improve the quality of their facilities and teachers, and inspired dozens of communities across the U.S.–including Pittsburgh; Peoria, Ill.; and Syracuse, N.Y.–to create Promise-like programs, 16 of them in Michigan alone. Despite these successes, the Promise’s donors remain fiercely protective of their anonymity–guessing their identities is a parlor game. Few with ties to the area could afford such a gift ...

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