Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has announced that a record number of high school seniors from the class of 2017 applied for the Tennessee Promise program and called on Tennessee adults to serve as mentors for the program. November 1 marked the deadline for the groundbreaking program which provides high school graduates two years of community or technical college free of tuition and fees, with 60,780 high school seniors applying. That’s up from 59,621 applicants in 2015.