LANSING — More Michigan adults will be eligible for tuition-free community college this fall after the state temporarily lowered the minimum age for the Michigan Reconnect scholarship program from 25 to 21.

The expansion was included in Michigan’s fiscal year 2026–27 education budget, with lawmakers allocating an additional $25 million to extend the program to eligible residents between the ages of 21 and 24.

Michigan Reconnect helps eligible adults who have not earned a college degree attend an in-district community or Tribal college without paying tuition. The scholarship covers in-district tuition, mandatory fees and contact hours. Students attending an out-of-district college receive funding up to the applicable in-district rate and may be responsible for the difference.

The program is available at 30 community and Tribal colleges across Michigan.

The lower eligibility age is funded for one year, although lawmakers could renew the expansion in the following state budget. Advocates are also supporting legislation that would make the change permanent.

Ryan Fewins-Bliss, executive director of the Michigan College Access Network, said that although the expansion is currently limited to one year, the need it addresses will remain.

“This was done as part of the budget, not a permanent change to the program,” Fewins-Bliss said, adding that some lawmakers are already working to make the expansion permanent “because we know the problem is not going to go away in one budget cycle.”

Fewins-Bliss said residents between 21 and 24 had fallen into a gap between Michigan’s major tuition-assistance programs.

“The Michigan Achievement Scholarship includes the Community College Guarantee and Michigan Reconnect,” he said. “Twenty-one- to 24-year-olds are not eligible for either of those in the traditional sense.”

He described the age group as a “lost population” that previously had access to little state-funded financial assistance, even after deciding to begin or resume their education.

“This Reconnect 21 program helps to solve that problem by reducing that age of eligibility,” he said.

This is not the first time Michigan Reconnect has been made available to residents ages 21 to 24. The state temporarily expanded the program in 2023 using federal COVID-19 recovery funds. That expansion lasted about a year and a half before the federal funding expired and the minimum age returned to 25.

Sarah Szurpicki, deputy director of the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential’s Office of Higher Education, said the earlier expansion was intended to address the educational disruptions caused by the pandemic.

“The original expansion of Reconnect down to age 21 was through federal COVID recovery dollars,” Szurpicki said. “It just was a limited funding source that ended, and so we had to only do it temporarily.”

She said the program targeted young adults who were likely disconnected from education during the pandemic and encouraged eligible residents not to hesitate to apply.

“For anyone who’s thinking about, ‘How do I earn a little more? How do I find a career that I really love? How do I make sure that in this time of uncertainty I have a stable path?’ investing your time and energy and letting the state pay the tuition and going back to college is the closest thing to a guarantee you can have of finding that stable path for yourself and your family,” Szurpicki said.

Michigan officials have set a goal of enrolling 8,000 students between the ages of 21 and 24 during the coming academic year. Applications for the expanded program are expected to become available online in mid-August at Michigan.gov/Reconnect.