What a magnanimous guy!
The Affordable Care Act and now this.
President Barack Obama wants to offer qualified students two free years of community college education. What a caring, generous, concerned leader!
He is, that is, until you look beyond the high gloss of his “America’s College Promise” proposal.
Without even full details, which won’t be revealed until after Obama’s State of the Union address later this month, the price tag for the program announced Friday at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville was said to be $60 billion over 10 years. The generous federal government, though, which would have to borrow more money from China to pay for the program, would share the burden with the already strapped states, which would pick up a fourth of the tab.
There are also a few caveats.
Community colleges will be asked to adopt “promising and evidence-based institutional reforms” to improve student outcomes. On the surface, that sounds like a sure-fire sign the federal government will stick its prying hands deeper in the colleges to tell them what it believes students most need.
Textbooks, transportation and living expenses aren’t — yet — included in the deal. For students who might not have considered going to college before, those are expenses that somehow will have to be met.
Without a doubt, America needs to be better educated, its workforce needs to be better trained and college tuition is expensive. On the surface, two free years of community college education seems like a perfect solution.
But the problems are some of the same ones Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam’s “Tennessee Promise” program is likely to have once it begins.
College is not for everybody. How many of the qualified students, who wouldn’t have attended college otherwise or had any intent to, will take the two free years, be forced out by not making the “steady progress” required and wind up having wasted one or two years when they might have otherwise found more suitable employment?
Already, only 20 percent of students enrolled in the first year of community college complete their program within 150 percent of the standard time, according to the United State Department of Education. And only 20 percent of community college students transfer to four-year schools. Of those, only 72 percent graduate or remain enrolled four years later, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
The program, no doubt, will be the perfect solution for some, who desired to go but never could have afforded it, but will those outnumber the ones who squander their opportunity? Doubtful.
Students who barely qualify for Obama’s program often will be the least prepared for college, and, as David Bergeron, vice president of postsecondary education at Center for American Progress, said for a Politico article, “these community colleges are the least resourced.”
Their resources, again, will help be able to help some students, but many more will fall by the wayside because they’re not able to handle the stress and responsibility of college.
What Haslam’s program does have going for it that Obama’s does not is a plan to pay for it. Some $300 million in funds from the Tennessee state lottery reserves, a $47 million endowment created by the General Assembly and aid from the state’s Hope Scholarship program are expected to pay for the Volunteer State program’s annual price tag of $34 million.
Governors, at the state level, sometimes have the flexibility to tinker with such programs and adjust them where necessary. That’s what will happen with the “Tennessee Promise” once students begin to use — or abuse — the program.
That’s also why former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s health care reform, often cited as a forerunner of the Affordable Care Act, might work for that state but has proved unworkable on a national basis.
There’s also this. Like health care, like most governments, the cost of college must be reined in. If the public were aware of the bureaucracy, the extraneous hiring, the spending on materials, the fluffy leave policies and the waste of time allowed today in some areas of most colleges, they would demand better.
But, also as in the health care industry and in governments, no one in college administration wants to see his or her fiefdom taken away. Thus, the price of college continues to increase, and what’s to say the increases won’t be more when the government’s paying the tab.
“America’s College Promise,” which would need the approval of Congress, is a nice idea in theory. For the country, it has all the possibilities of another Obamacare mess.
States can and should experiment with how to help more of their qualified students who want to go to college to get there. That might mean funding individual colleges with more money for first-generation students. It might mean loaning students the money interest-free to go to college, collecting it if they fail to graduate and forgiving it if they do.
If the federal government ledger ever returns to the black, it also might consider similar assistance.
But a one-size-fits-all program rarely works, and this particular one would be dangerous to students, colleges and the country’s wallet.