Obama to Propose Paying Community College Tuition for Some

Community College absolutely transformed me and many of my (at the time) classmate's lives.

In my case I grew up poor, without much opportunity, and the (again, at the time) dirt cheap rates, open admission and guaranteed transfer to a local 4-year gave me opportunity I absolutely didn't have in the few years before I got sick and tired of the dead-end shitty hourly part-time jobs I could get.

Many of my classmates were immigrants and refugees, there to learn English, or get started in their new lives. Now, many years later, they're happy productive citizens, married, with families, working six figure jobs...easily paying off each year what they're entire community college education cost any sort of taxpayer subsidies. Most of them have gone on to get M.S. and even a couple of PhDs.

The doors to get into higher education don't admit everybody equally, but sometimes you can get into other doors if you're willing to go in the side entrance. On the other side, I've worked pretty consistently with people who went to much more highly ranked schools than I did, or came from better pedigrees, and we've all ended up in the same place.

Bonus: my entire college education, from Freshman through my M.S. cost about what a reasonable family sedan cost, and raised my marketability so much that I paid it all off by the time I finished school. I hear of peers, decades later, still paying hundreds of dollars a month on insane student loans, and I feel really lucky to have stumbled into the path I ended up on...despite a little pride swallowing.

I went to community college and transferred into an excellent, top 5 (according to some rankings anyway) school. I would say that most people in community college don't really want to be there. Many of the students that I started with are still there (3 years later), and will likely not graduate nor transfer.

From my experience I still think the education problem needs to be solved in K-6th grade. I believe my successful transition from community college to a university was the result of excellent classmates who I joined in middle and high school (many of them went to schools like Yale or MIT so perhaps there was some sort of exposure effect) and/or very encouraging community college teachers/professors. Personally I found community college professors to be way more invested (on the upper end, anyway) then my high school teachers, and I went to a pretty good high school.

The reason it should start at K-6th grade is because so many people lack solid foundations. There are people in community college who are not good at algebra. These fundamentals need to be well taught. In addition, kids need to learn how to teach themselves and also need to be properly motivated, but not coddled.

Increasing the pay of teachers and making teaching as a profession more prestigious and rigorous will solve the K-6th grade education problem, which will help with education as a whole.

Oh, and we should do something about poverty (because let's face it, if you're poor and in a terrible neighborhood, the odds are against you. I know, because I was that person).

The student loan crisis is a much bigger problem.

18 year old kids are being given the ability to take on massive, crushing debt that is too easily used for vacations, boob jobs, or whatever else, and even when it is only used for classes, people feel like they need to take on this debt to spend 4 years learning (and forgetting) material that they will never use, for degrees that probably won't be relevant to their career.

Just to get a slip of paper that says "bachelor's degree". It is trapping people.

Making community college easily accessible is a nice step, but community college is already incredibly cheap in most places, people don't go there because of costs but because they don't have the name recognition of a state school or a big private school.

Sometimes small policy steps like this (it won't get passed in this climate anyway) are more destructive than not doing anything at all. They give the illusion of progress, or treat the symptoms when the real illness remains unresolved

Nice idea, but the final effect will be higher prices across the higher-ed system.

When the other party controls Congress, presidential proposals without the active involvement of that other party aren't real and aren't intended to or expected to pass. This is just politics.

I do wonder what type of effect this will cause with job requirements, will master's now be the new bachelors?

The more worrying issue is the government taking on more student loan debt. There is a student loan bubble but it has not hurt the economy partially due to federal requirements that the loan not be discharged. What happens if current graduation rates hold steady and the US is stuck with a large bill but nothing to show for the effort?

Sounds like a good plan to me. Community colleges are one of the most overlooked--yet most important--parts of the educational system. Almost everyone who attends a for-profit school with flashy ads would have been better off at their local community college.

America has been forsaking our commitment to public higher education for decades now. If we're going to finally start investing again, community colleges are a great place to begin.

My girlfriend and mother both started at community college, both transferred to Berkeley and both did very well there. They saved a lot of money in the process. And while those success stories are great (and not that rare) the more important role of CC may be preparing people with sub-par high school educations for a more rigorous college experience.

Having said that, I'd rather see a push for universal pre-school education.

TFA says Fed currently pays 16%, students pay 30%, and presumably state pays the balance. Under the new program the Fed would pay 75% and states would pay 25%?

Then they have quotes from Tennessee Rep calling it “a top-down federal program that will ask already cash-strapped states to help pick up the tab.” Maybe I'm missing something...

In contrast to the Tennessee program, which is a “last dollar” scholarship, paying only for tuition costs not covered by other programs. A low-income student who is eligible for a maximum Pell Grant of $5,730 would not receive assistance under the Tennessee program, because that amount would already cover tuition."

So in short, need more details but this just doesn't add up. If students already only pay 30% to the Feds 16%, why not just boost the Fed contribution to 25% and call it a day?

I went to Bellevue Community College in 1992, right after high school, and was fortunate enough to take part in their nascent "Multimedia Design" program. Considering the neighborhood, we had software and support from a lot of the local tech companies. I got to use early versions of Director, Photoshop, even Linux, which definitely set me on a more productive path with computers. I ended up going to a University the following year, but that was due to other circumstances and not that I didn't find the school and the education I received there valuable. Indeed, it very much set me on my path.

Macroeconomically, a program like this would have made more sense at a time of low-growth/high-unemployment, like a few years ago. (It might work best as a countercyclical program: when many people are idle, subsidize skills-building education, but as unemployment drops, expect people to pay their own tuition or learn-on-the-job instead.)

I'd rather see a more general program that would pay anyone's tuition for one class per semester.

As AI/automation takes over jobs, this is exactly what people should be paid to do - go to school.

I hate that the federal government is getting involved. The states are figuring it out. Leave this alone... Vote for local politicians to follow the Tennessee model or don't. There is no need for federal involvement.

I would actually go farther and say we should merge the current K-12 into 11 years instead of 13, and make every student complete an associate degree by the age of 18.

The current system of K-12, especially in the US, has always been way too padded. The advent of the internet and readily available educational materials has accelerated this exponentially. A child born today would be shocked to hear that I learned C++ by driving to a far away building and checking out a dead tree with ink on it. That same child should be equally shocked that we can't expect him to learn actively at home and in the classroom faster than his grandparents did, who had a sliver of the access to information of modern generations.

I saw first hand what this could look like. My parents were not affluent enough to send me to a private school, but they were affluent enough to move to a area in New Jersey with a very well-funded public school system. We had a sister community college that had a great reputation, and as a option for upperclassmen who skipped grades or took courses early, they could drive the community college and take classes instead. We actually had one student my senior year who got an Associate Degree before his High School degree.

Personally I took 2 summer math classes and 2 programming classes at this college, and the difference between the CC and High School was stark.

- Professors didn't have to babysit: If you acted out, you got kicked out. No discussion.

- You self-selected to other like-minded individuals who were both interested and aggressive about learning the material in the class.

- Teachers could actually teach without dealing with school board restrictions or materials.

- Funding policies actually made sense since the entity managing them wasn't completely government run.

- You could treat the students like adults, and not have to worry about discussing controversial material, or that a parent would helicopter in and threaten to sue the school.

This whole process made me a lot more excited for college. It also showed me there was so much more material out there than what I thought about in High School. I think this process should be funded, and eventually mandatory, otherwise the US will find itself behind.

I remember a Star Trek TNG episode (I can't recall the number) where a parent was chasing a 10-yo child for skipping class. The child complained casually that he didn't want to learn Calculus. We may never get that far for every child, but I dream of a world where a brilliant 10-yo could get that far if he wanted to.

Part II.

To continue my rant, I actually think the Obama Administration is smart in how it is executing on this issue.

In the US, the execution of compulsory education happens at the state and local level. Local governments get to decide how "important" education is to them, specifically with their budgets. On the plus side, this helps us avoid the (potentially republic-damaging) process of convincing 316 million people that the federal government is the best entity to handle child education (and create a massive bureaucracy to boot). On the downside, as a country we are dropping the ball in preparing the next generation to be solid competitors in the global marketplace.

When this problem last came up it was during the cold war, specifically after Sputnik launched. There was a massive, national push to make more students in tune with modern education, which resulted in the passing of the National Defense Education Act [1]. Basically, it required a existential crisis in order to motivate the US to seriously fund education nationally.

Now, 50 years later, I'm continually blown away when I discuss education with my colleagues who grew up abroad. In European (especially ex-soviet bloc) countries, India, and Asia, education is significantly more rigorous and highly valued, which results in a significantly more prepared workforce.

I like, or hope, to think that in case the Obama Administration sees the same thing. Specifically:

- We are now 17th in global education ranking [2], and even lower in Math and Science [3]

- In the rapidly globalizing economy, this gap in education is now a national security issue

- Other up-and-coming economies all have much deeper cultural values for educations, with a national government that reflects it.

- Federalizing the system (ala West Wing Season 7) is too drastic, and will never pass congress anyway

- Our one massive advantage, our higher education system (which is the envy of the world), specifically the relatively affordable community colleges, is being underutilized.

By taking federal funding and pumping it into a solution that is reasonably affordable, partially shared with the states, and bypass the State and local governments, we are essentially doing what educational reformers have always dreamed we could do: Fund education like we do the military.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act

[2] http://www.ibtimes.com/us-17th-global-education-ranking-finl...

[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-rankings-2013-12

Since republicans control congress at the moment, they know it will be veto'd, but it will only help to push the agenda that republicans are bad. I see this being used to push the next presidential race.

I'm all for education, but so much of what passes for it is pure nonsense (IMHOP).

And I'm not sure taxpayers ought to pay for, nor encourage, nonsense. That's what parents are for. They have an incentive to say "no" after a bit.

Maybe cleaning up the "educational" system a little might be a better first step. This program could simply be an expensive way (for taxpayers) to have a bunch of semi-bored kids half studying the sociology of Amish Lesbians while claiming they are getting a useful eduction.

(this comment is not intended to offend Lesbians, Sociologists, The Amish, nor Semi-Bored kids... it's just that there is so much nonsense in schools.....I'd be all for the program if it was free math classes only.)

This just seems like a pork barrel type thing for some groups, without achieving the stated objective of eduction.

Dear Republican Friends,

Don't worry about Obama's community college announcement, it's a great idea.

I mean, clearly the education market is far too competitive as is. With average annual tuition rates of $2,700, who can afford to go to community college I ask you. Clearly, if we remove all competition in the market, that price can only go down, right?

And I shouldn't need to remind you that the teachers unions have clearly shown themselves amenable to keeping education affordable. Putting all power in their hands is a sure-fire play for better education.

Look at the public school teachers in my home-state of Pennsylvania! They're absolute saints, taking in a pathetic $62,000 dollars average per anum, after being short-changed with only a 23% raise in income in the last 10 years. Granted, that was with a Republican governor, so they may have gotten a fair 38% with a Democratic governor, but I think the point stands. They never use their union clout in a way that hurts our students.

And just look at what they did with public middle and high schools! The taxpayers of Washington, DC, for example, are paying a measly $29,000 per pupil, and we all know the high quality of the DC public schools! This is clearly a place where government regulation is needed.

No, don't get upset my friends.

Obama is just looking out for the little guys on this one. This has, I assure you, nothing to do with Obama trying to claim back support from the teachers unions after they started attacking him, quite rightly I must add, for instantiating our evil (Republican) decade-long request that poor schools be given the tools to fire incompetent teachers.

Don't fret, big government loves you.