U.S. students owed a total of $988 billion in 2011. This debt is a key reason President Barack Obama has championed education reforms to make higher education more affordable for students.

One of Obama’s education reform proposals is modeled after Governor Bill Haslam’s own Tennessee Promise, which guarantees graduating high school seniors two years of community college free of charge starting in the fall of 2015.

But where does the money for the Tennessee Promise come from, and what effect will this new policy actually have for the students, faculty and staff in universities across the state?

These are the questions posed by UT’s Progressive Student Alliance at a teach-in event Monday night to inform students about education reform and help them follow the money trail tied to the Tennessee Promise. To do this, they used statistics from the New York Federal Reserve and the American Sociological Association.

“Obama is saying that Tennessee is doing good things for education, and we want to reject that and say that things aren’t going very well in Tennessee and we need to go in a different direction,” said Jenishea Lewis, a sophomore in psychology and member of the PSA.

Robert Naylor, senior in global studies and union and community liaison of the PSA, said that while the president and the governor have praised Tennessee Promise as an innovative way to help students afford college, it is really just a reallocation of the HOPE scholarship money many students at four-year universities depend on.

“Students who are here for their first two years at a college like UT are going to lose a $1,000 worth of the HOPE scholarship, and students going to community colleges will gain that thousand,” Naylor explained.

“It’s just changing how the scholarships are being distributed in Tennessee.”

Lewis said this reduction in HOPE scholarship funds combined with higher education budget cuts will end up costing students, faculty and workers more in the long run, rather than truly providing a more affordable education.

“It’s hidden behind this facade of free community college, but along with 40 million in de-funding in higher education, it’s really like taking three steps back and one pseudo-step forward,” Lewis said. “It’s not really making any progress, not benefiting students the way that it says it is.”

Lewis and Naylor created an outline of the potential consequences involved with education budget cuts, including an obvious increase in tuition as well as a decrease in pay and benefits for university faculty and staff. The two concluded these factors will lead to a decrease in the overall quality of education.

In order to accurately represent the difficulties many university faculty already face, the PSA invited Gabe Crowell, an adjunct history professor working at Pellissippi, Walter State, Bethel Univeristy and Roan State, to discuss the realities of working in higher education.

Crowell said that he, along with over half of all teachers at community colleges and the majority of adjunct professors, don’t receive basic health and retirement benefits or negotiating power and representation, leaving them in a constant state of job insecurity.

“I came here tonight, to say ‘hey, your teachers might not be what you think they are, they’re struggling to pay their bills,’” Crowell said.

Students and faculty, however, are not the only people who will be affected by budget cuts, as campus workers currently make nine dollars an hour, lower than the “living wage” outlined by the UT Faculty Senate.

In order to avoid these negative effects of a decreased budget, PSA is calling for students and faculty to begin discussing the Tennessee Promise and education reform immediately.

“We need to do something about it,” Naylor said, “because this is going to spread far beyond our campus if we don’t.”