August 18
Despite federal cuts to higher ed, Mass. free community college presses on,
transforming students’ lives
By Mara Kardas-Nelson and Diti Kohli Globe Staff,Updated August 17, 2025,
Until recently, Michael Hannigan figured he’d never go back to school.
When he was in his late 20s, he’d enrolled in community college to study farming, an interest he developed when he worked on tobacco farms growing up in Western Massachusetts. Hannigan was the first in his family to attend college. To support himself, he worked as a janitor at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Balancing full-time work and school was difficult. After a semester, he dropped out, owing more than $2,000 in unpaid fees. It took years working as a dishwasher and a janitor to pay it off.
“Whenever I thought about going back to school I knew that if, for some reason, I got overwhelmed with work and couldn’t go to school, I’d accrue that debt,” Hannigan, 43, said. “It’s one of the things that dissuaded me from going to school again.”
Hannigan is now president of the Greenfield Community College student senate, president of the college’s permaculture club, and two classes short of graduating with a degree in farm and food systems. With straight As, he hopes to transfer to a four-year college next year.
His turnaround is thanks to a program called MassReconnect, which launched in 2022, offering free community college to state residents over age 25 who don’t have a bachelor’s degree. It is the precursor to the state’s MassEducate program, which started a year later, offering free community college to all residents.
Early data suggest Massachusetts’ experiment with free community college has been successful. Enrollment has shot up by more than 15,000 students, student retention has increased, and newly graduated students are now transferring to four-year universities.
But while state funding for the programs is ensured for next year, federal cuts to higher education put the long-term feasibility of the program on shaky ground.
Many students say their lives have been changed by free community college. “If it wasn’t for free community college, I’d just be working some manual labor job at UMass right now, not even thinking about college,” Hannigan said. read more