Community college already mostly free

Published 8:04 pm Sunday, May 10, 2015

 

The Obama White House sent out a tweet last week as part of its new push. Along with the hashtag #CollegeIn5Words, the White House tweeted, “community college should be free.”

Now, aside from the fairly irreverent responses to #CollegeIn5Words (this is Twitter, after all), there’s another pithy slogan the White House should remember: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

And there’s no such thing as free community college. It will still cost plenty — those professors and adjuncts and groundskeepers and coaches don’t work for free.

As with anything with a cost attached, it makes sense to do a simple cost-benefit analysis before agreeing to anything.

Are there benefits? Sure. There’s a lot of sense in President Barack Obama’s plan for tuitionless community college. Just as free public education has been a ladder for countless Americans to rise above poverty, community college serves a vital function today in helping prepare young people for their futures. One of the best parts of Obama’s America’s College Promise plan is that it covers certifications, not just associate’s degrees. That will help provide the skilled workers — from welders and plumbers and electricians to nurses and health care techs — our economy will need as the Baby Boom generation retires.



But it comes back to cost. The plan will cost — at a minimum — $60 billion over 10 years. That doesn’t cover the 25 percent the president expects the states to pick up.

And here’s the thing — it’s an unnecessary expense. There are already programs, big and small, to help students attend community college.

“Tuition at community colleges for poor students is already low or nonexistent, making the president’s plan more a transfer program to state governments and middle-class consumers than anything else,” National Review wrote recently. “A universal free approach to community college would replace a great deal of need-based aid.”

In other words, the plan wouldn’t benefit the poor — it would benefit the middle and upper class families who don’t need the help.

As we have noted before, college students have a term for the financial assistance they receive over and above what they need for tuition, books and fees. They call it beer money.

But what National Review points out is that the real problem with community college these days isn’t access — pretty much everyone who wants in can get in — but completion rates.

“President Obama’s plan is not going to fix this,” the magazine explains. “The plan, like decades of federal policy for elementary and secondary schools, proposes to link funding to a push for accountability and best practices at community colleges. Yet we expect this to work as well as it has in the past: It’s no better an idea to try to run Bunker Hill Community College from Washington than it was to try to run Peoria High the same way.”

The White House’s hashtag calls for college in five words. It’s not “community college should be free.” A better five words might be, “college is worth the cost.”