Posted on 01/13/2015 7:33:12 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The logic behind the “free” community-college program President Obama announced last week is understandable. A high-school education once put many well-paying jobs within reach of Americans. Today, post-high-school work is increasingly necessary. So President Obama has proposed that two years of community college be free for students in most programs, accompanied by more oversight and accountability from Washington.
The problems begin where they did with efforts to improve elementary and secondary education from Washington: Why is a locally provided good the concern of the federal government? And since when was America’s K–12 educational system, let alone the federal government’s attempts to improve it, a model anyone was eager to emulate?
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. A universal free approach to community college would replace a great deal of aid that’s targeted at the poor, which would have the merit of eliminating the implicit tax such aid creates for the working poor. And the cost of attending community college does go far beyond tuition — it’s expensive to reduce or forgo work.
But the main problem at community colleges is not cost, or work disincentives, but the appallingly low rates at which their students finish with a useful credential. President Obama’s plan is not going to fix this.
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.
President Obama announced his plan in Tennessee, where Republican governor Bill Haslam has overseen a program providing the same two free years at the state’s community colleges. But Haslam’s program already has a performance-based funding scheme. Such a system never works all that well, and Haslam’s plan has other problems too. But by funding 75 percent of his proposal at the federal level, President Obama would undermine the incentives state governments have to spend money wisely and try to replace them with federal oversight.
There are simpler ways to impose accountability on community colleges than the inevitable web of federal regulations: Force them to provide transparent data to consumers, and consider requiring them to have skin in the game, taking a share of the risk that students won’t graduate and will default on their loans.
Furthermore, the president’s proposal would hugely benefit one segment of a dysfunctional market, public community colleges — it’s hard to compete with free. For-profit and nonprofit two-year institutions have not been spectacularly successful, but they have managed to fill some demand for professionally useful certificates and degrees. All segments of the market could do a better job if federal aid were made simpler (without being made vastly more generous) and regulations on schools were rolled back. Some of the more successful community-college initiatives across the country have involved closer cooperation with local employers, to suit their needs. The secretary of education doesn’t have much to add to that conversation.
Many of the worries about a market-driven approach to four-year higher education simply don’t register at the community-college level: Their mostly nontraditional student bodies are looking for career advancement more than intellectual enrichment. The fundamental barriers to entry, besides those imposed by the government, are lower. There’s no reason, in fact, that conservatives at the state and federal levels shouldn’t be responding to the woes of our community colleges with their own approach.
The president’s announcement didn’t even come with a gesture toward how the costs, which will run into the billions per year, would be paid for. That, coupled with the plan’s intrinsic flaws, reflects the growing exhaustion of Obama’s agenda. However important a college degree has become, another middle-class entitlement is not the way to provide it.
Another FReeper whose name I can’t remember explained this succinctly by pointing out that two more years of education are needed just to get kids close to having a minimal “High School” education.
Hopefully the CCs will be teaching algebra and not gender studies.
Ah, yes. More ‘Money for Nothing and Chicks for Free.’
http://calwatchdog.com/2015/01/09/college-kids-read-at-7th-grade-level/
Precisely. The average Freshman reads a the 7th grade level
Community college associate degrees are referred to as "the 5th and 6th years of high school."
I don’t care what benefits the government hands out to buy votes, as long as they continue to give me a COLA in my federal retirement check. This year it’s 1.7 %. A few years ago after Obama was first elected, he stopped the COLA for two years and made us suffer, that with the minimal interest rates on CDs and bank accounts makes me think he’s pandering to the youngest generation to redistribute the older generation’s savings. So if the youngest citizens vote to burden our nation with huge debt for free college, let them suffer in the long run, it’s their doing and won’t be here to see it.
Part of $hitface’s legacy. He will be able to say that he proposed this and that the Republicans squashed it.
First things first.... Let’s be realistic, the problem is not community college, the problem is in HIGH SCHOOL ITSELF:
Nearly 4 in 10 minority students do not graduate with their class. The total number of high-school dropouts annually is presently about 3,030,000, or about 8,300 per day.
SOURCE:
http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/20/by-the-numbers-high-school-dropouts/
High school dropouts commit about 75 percent of crimes in the U.S.
Among adults over 25 without a high-school diploma in 2011, the unemployment rate is 14.1%, versus 9.4% for those who did not drop out.
Average amount of money a high school graduate will earn more than a dropout in a lifetime is $260,000.
Median earnings for full time workers age 25 and older who did not have a high school diploma in 2008 was $24,300, versus $33,800 for those who did not drop out.
Getting just one student to not drop out would mean an average of more than $200,000 in higher tax revenues and lower government expenditures over his or her lifetime.
If half of the 1.3 million dropouts from the Class of 2010 had graduated from high school, they could have generated:
$5.3 billion in increased earnings
$4.2 billion in increased spending
$6.7 billion in increased Gross National Product (GDP)
$499 million in increased state tax revenue
SOURCE: http://www3.nd.edu/~jwarlick/documents/Levin_Belfield_Muennig_Rouse.pdf%20
If the number of high school dropouts in each age cohort was cut in half, the government would reap $45 billion via extra tax revenues and reduced costs of public health, of crime and justice, and in welfare payments.
The report from the second source cited above gives the expected savings average of $3,000 for each welfare recipient that doesn’t drop out (Table 11 on page 16).
None of the information presented here is secret. Source URLs are provided so that even a dropout can find them (the most brain dead liberal as well). Dropouts don’t have as bright a future as those willing to get educated. Liberals will provide lots of emotion, but they can’t refute facts.
So, instead of solving an existing problem, So what does Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama propose? Another give-away program.
Progressive don’t see problems as things to be solved.
Progressives see problems as opportunities to exploit misery.
I was a university professor for over 30 years and I'm not so sure about this anymore. Look at the want ads. A person who can weld, fix a car, or many other trade skills is more in demand now than most college graduates. How many poor-choice college majors are working parttime jobs and living at home? Today, which would be better: Invest in yourself via a trade school or go to college?
I think Obozo knows this idea is just a money pit and his goal is to make this country broke. From his point of view, so far, so good.
There are zillions of free MOOCs on the Internet, many of which provide certificates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
If a student also needs lab courses or fieldwork, he/she might take individual courses at a CC, hopefully with industry participation.
If CCs get creative and help students combine MOOCs with labs/fieldwork, that would GREATLY cut the cost of an associate’s degree or of job training for post college adults, and would be superior to obama’s unworkable “free CC” proposal.
MOOCs could also shorten the time for a student to complete a four-year degree, also cutting costs. (Some MOOCs are even given by the Harvards, MITs, Stanfords of the world, so are high-qulaity.)
I personally believe it is more of a ploy to get dems elected. FDR really mastered the "art" of patronage and dems have been improving on it since.
I ran against a twenty year incumbent and his entire campaign was a laundry list of spending programs that he would facilitate and I would not. It is what they do. The end result is the same either way.
A most excellent piece of research!
Pity the Left will never see it...
This of course, will fail for a few reasons. One is that, the government is not in control of community colleges. Free tuition is nothing more than a block grant to state and local governments to hire teachers. Government unions love this.
Second, teachers who are so happy with this now, will not be when they see their classes filled with people who don’t care and don’t show up after the first class.
And the reason its so stupid in the first place, is that Khan Academy and others are already providing high quality college courses for free or very little money.
Colleges are not worth the money. The one thing that colleges provide, is a 4 year hiatus from growing up. And an admissions IQ test that verifies that you are not stupid. Zuckerberg, Gates, and Jobs all got into great schools but, left them because they did not need to learn anything the schools could teach. The real world teaches everything better.
This is why the program will fail after wasting billions and will never be shut down.
Do you want to be first to volunteer to see a doctor or even take your sick kitten to a veterinarian taught on the, er, “real life” principle?
Or drive in a car or cross a bridge or ride in an elevator designed by an engineer taught on the, er, “real life” principle?
Much debate swirls around the merit of liberal arts programs, but this is not what is being discussed here.
” So, instead of solving an existing problem, So what does Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama propose? Another give-away program.”
If this had a chance of success, Obama wouldn’t propose this. His goal is to destroy, not build. Here he scores twice
1)Spend billions on failure
2)Payoff to the teachers unions
DOUBLE WHAMMY.
I certainly do not want to be the first to go to a doctor with a community college education.
Obama’s dysfunctional logic never ends and I bet he thinks people will name bridges after him when he’s out of office.
Yeah.
We need more of those.
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