You would think that I would be the type of person who is extremely “rah-rah” about Obama’s community college plan. Instead, I’m “meh.”
Yes, community colleges are a fantastic resource for people that were given the short end of the stick in their local public schools. It gives people a chance to find a respectable career in a technical field or to build academic skills to let them jump into the four year college system. Community colleges are places for untraditional students. They are places for second chances. I love all that.
I sometimes check out the course offers at our local community college, because I can see Ian getting a degree as a sound engineer or in computer repair or electronics. He would be great at that stuff.
David Brooks makes good points in his column today.
The problem is that getting students to enroll is neither hard nor important. The important task is to help students graduate. Community college drop out rates now hover somewhere between 66 percent and 80 percent.
Spending $60 billion over 10 years to make community college free will do little to reduce that. In the first place, community college is already free for most poor and working-class students who qualify for Pell grants and other aid. In 2012, 38 percent of community-college students had their tuition covered entirely by grant aid and an additional 33 percent had fees of less than $1,000.
The Obama plan would largely be a subsidy for the middle- and upper-middle-class students who are now paying tuition and who could afford to pay it in the years ahead.
Brooks says that that $60K would be better spent on living expenses for students (tuition costs are small in comparison), guidance counselors and mentors, and child care.
Louisa also points out in the comment section from a previous post that this program would mostly subsidize administrators in DC and wouldn’t help the $2,500 per class adjuncts who teach those classes or improve conditions for students at these schools.
Apt. 11d 
I don’t know about guidance counselors, but childcare and living expenses seem like obviously better places for aid. Also, obviously even less likely in the current political climate. It’s worth remembering that while it might be reasonable to call for more aid on living expenses, Brooks is mostly working in support of people who decided the middle of the recession was the right time to cut food stamps.
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“Brooks is mostly working in support of people who decided the middle of the recession was the right time to cut food stamps.”
If friends must allow friends to read David Brooks (and in general they shouldn’t), this is definitely worth keeping in mind.
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I’m pretty “meh” about it too, but I can’t decide if that’s because of self-interest (I teach at a public university) or because it’s a pretty “meh” plan. My concerns are two-fold. First, I see this as pretty disruptive of higher education. We serve a lot of working-class, first generation college students too. If this plan were to become law, then many of those students would take their first two years at the local community college. It would decimate our lower classes and thus decimate our institution. Now, there may be a good case for why community college and why not a free two years of public higher ed, but I haven’t really heard Obama make that. I listened for it last night, but he said 2/3 of jobs will require some college (NOT an associate degree), so that doesn’t really tell me why community college. Why not subsidize the first two years of college and let students decide where to go?
If it’s a cost thing (i.e. can’t afford to give it to everyone) then make it means tested (although of course, that would make it less popular). If it’s a class thing (community college would benefit primarily lower income students), well then – that gets me to my second concern. I see this as potentially further stratifying higher ed. Under this plan, it seems to me that the only people who would be going to a 4 year institution would be those who are wealthy. And while community college can be immensely beneficial, I also see tremendous benefits from attending a 4 year institution for your whole 4 years. For instance, I typically have teaching assistants and undergraduate research assistants. Generally speaking, I get to know them in their first and second year, and then they start working for me in their third (for a variety of practical reasons). I have worked with many low-income and first generation students, and it’s a tremendous opportunity for them. Students who study abroad usually do so in their junior or senior – that becomes more difficult if you’re a transfer student (and yes – you can study abroad cheaply, so this is not just something rich kids should be doing). I could go on and on, but the point is that the sorts of enriching co-curricular opportunities will become (even more than ever) the province of the rich.
I guess I am just worried that this creates a very stratified higher education system – one for the masses and one for the elites. Perhaps that’s what we already have, but I don’t see this solution as making it better, and I think it may even make it worse. I am open to being convinced otherwise, but I haven’t really heard anything from Obama. The cynical part of me thinks that’s because he knows there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that this will pass a Republican Congress, so why waste time making the case. And that really depresses me as I’d like to see a real serious conversation in this country about how to deal with income inequality and the inequality of opportunity that plagues us.
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CCs are great for certain purposes, like training or retraining for specific areas. They are also really cheap, at least in some places. One of my friends, long after her BA, went back and got a 30-hours paralegal degree for something like $3000, and that was without financial aid – it’s about $100/credit hour. So yes, the tuition is not the issue for most people, and many others can get help on that already.
The other challenge is that working out articulation agreements with state colleges is hugely complicated. This is basically to allow students to transfer credit from a CC so that they can get a BA. State colleges want these students, but then compromises have to be made – can the US History 1917-present at the CC replace the US History 1865-present here? (and lots of questions more complicated than that). Also, some CCs provide great classes that are definitely comparable to our gen eds, and others do not… Again, this is one reason why we have more administrators than we used to.
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I don’t see the issue as getting people to enroll or graduate, but getting people to learn and acquire useable skills. Pressure on enrolling creates certain sets of incentives, and pressure on graduating another, the worst of which is to “graduate” people without regard to their learning.
I think there should be very low cost public education available to people after high school. But, I do think the details matter, on who has access, for what classes, and in which circumstances. I feel there’s a magical thinking among the elite who used education to leapfrog into success (folks like Obama, Michelle, Sotomayeur — there are probably some whites, to reference, too, but I don’t know their names off the top of my head), in the value of offering education (as opposed to thriving with it).
The model I want to explore is education in the form of apprenticeships. If there are jobs that require the education we are trying to offer, why can’t the employers pay for the education, with the promise of a job afterwards, if the program is successfully completed? And, we can subsidize/share costs to account for those students who will consume the resources, but not successfully complete a program (and, thus, presumably not be qualified for a job). The goal with this model would be to provide quality control, rather than relying on the love of education to provide that quality control.
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I have a lot of reservations (like money going to administrators instead of teachers, state university systems not establishing clear guidelines on which courses they’ll accept for transfer credit, incentive to graduate kids that haven’t learned anything, etc etc) but I don’t think money going to living expenses is a good idea at all.
One thing that’s important about CC is that enrollment is very flexible – you can enroll and drop out if you have to or skip a semester and then re-enroll when you are ready. And that is important for a lot of the target market, who aren’t 18 year old with family resources, but adults with other commitments and complications and less of a safety net.
When student need to drop for awhile – they just aren’t ready for more schooling, they have a family crisis or a demanding new job – you actually want them to drop out and come back later, not stay in because that’s how they pay the rent.
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Yes, I think that’s been a huge unintended consequence of the current system, of student loans and financing and agree that it is a good part of the plan not to cover living expenses as a condition of enrollment.
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Yes!
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Flexibility is great, but this sometimes leads to people trying to put together a degree (AA or BA or whatever) from several different schools, in different states, over the course of a dozen years or more. This can be difficult and lead to a lot of wasted income and time. Schools change their curricula and requirements, and different schools have different courses available. This is the advantage of the cohesive two or four-year degree (or a part-time degree that lasts longer, but is done in a more or less continuous period of time).
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On NPR the the other day, the people discussing the plan said that, for people who already qualify for Pell Grants (which is how community college would be free for most lower income people) this program would not effect their grant eligibility, and that the money could then be used for books and/or living expenses. If that’s right, then it does quite a lot more than Brooks suggests. That should be no surprise, since of course Brooks isn’t a reliable source. (Doug is pretty much spot on on Brooks.) Now, I’m not sure if this is right, but it’s what several people were saying on a show discussing the program.
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That’s actually very problematic.
At some level of support, just going to CC becomes primarily a current income source for the “student,” rather than a source of knowledge or future income.
I believe one of my CC relatives has already run into this dynamic in WA–students signed up to do CC classes primarily because of the income it generates. They literally could not afford not to be CC students. (Not clear exactly how the nuts and bolts of that work, but that’s what I was told.)
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Sorry, that should be “one of my CC instructor relatives.”
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