
Obama to Propose Paying Community College Tuition for Some - krambs
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/us/politics/obama-proposes-free-community-college-education-for-some-students.html
======
bane
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.

~~~
danjayh
Since I'll probably get more than a few downvotes for my main comment below,
I'll start by saying that I adjunct teach software development at our local
CC, even though the pay (if you calculate it on a 'per hour' basis) is way
less than my 'real' job. Adjuncts get screwed, but I enjoy teaching, and
appreciate the opportunities that CC gives to students ... I just wanted to
frame my comment so that you understand my perspective.

Now, on to the part that's going to get me into trouble: I completely and
totally disagree with the idea of letting students attend CC without paying.

Many students coming into CC, even when they are responsible for part of the
tuition (which at most current CCs is only about 30%), struggle to find
motivation to work hard on their classes and finish them. Although some
students surely would benefit from 'free' college (I put it in quotes because
nothing is free -- the rest of us will be paying for it), I do not think that
offering free CC is a good use of taxpayer money. Simply put, CC is already
heavily subsidized, and I think that if the students have no skin in it at all
they'll be less motivated to succeed, which doesn't do anyone any favors.

Additionally, for those students who do try, and who do succeed, the potential
return will GREATLY eclipse their investment (as you noted). For these
students, it is once again totally unnecessary to subsidize tuition because
their increased income will more than offset the cost of their education.

~~~
withdavidli
Not downvoting, there's a legitamate concern about skin in the game mentality.
But that's not how it is now. People take on debt by signing a piece of paper,
they have no idea what that amount really means until they start paying it
off. College loans are too easy to get, 20k here, 40k there, don't start
paying until 4 years after. At 18 years old, how many students have experience
struggling with interest payments that would take up almost all their
disposable income?

Another thing is the peer pressure to attend college from an early age. Those
that don't qualify for top tier schools settle for 2nd and 3rd choices,
sometime state schools, other times private colleges that are basically degree
mills charging 30k/yr.

------
nkangoh
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).

~~~
up_and_up
> I would say that most people in community college don't really want to be
> there.

Odd. That wasn't my experience at all.

I went to Cabrillo College, a community college in Aptos, CA.

Great school, inspiring profs (many with PhD's), students were generally
engaged and excited to be there.

I transferred to Berkeley, did well there (felt well-prepared) and saved a
heck of a lot of money a long the way. Zero debt post graduation.

I highly recommend Community College, albeit make sure good transfer options
exist.

I have heard of people transferring the Stanford and Yale from Cabrillo, but
maybe it's just an exception.

~~~
bane
I concur. At least in the circle of people I spent my time with, we were there
really to study and grab the opportunity CC gave us. The teachers don't make
anything there, so they're also extra eager to help students who really put
forth the effort.

Hands down, 9 of the 10 best teachers I had were CC profs. They were so happy
to help, they'd show up on weekends and help out with study groups and review
coursework again to make sure you really got the foundational stuff so you
didn't get lost later.

The age range was crazy too, from sharp 14 year olds there to take Calculus,
to senior citizens. _always_ somebody interesting to run into and incredible
tutoring opportunities everywhere.

CC can be an _incredible_ resource.

Most important, they're also designed for mid-career training, so you can go
and take classes in whatever they offer even if you aren't in a degree
program, just because you want to. My wife and I both take classes from time-
to-time in subjects we've tried to autodidact, but some cheap classroom time
has ended up helping everytime. Or we'll take a class together in something
like Art and turn it into a date-night....get dinner after work, take a
painting class, come home with a little piece of art.

~~~
dllthomas
_" The age range was crazy too, from sharp 14 year olds there to take
Calculus, to senior citizens."_

I took a Recent American History class, and one of my classmates had been a
member of SNCC.

------
aaron-lebo
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

~~~
eastbayjake
> 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.

My wife and I have this argument frequently and I usually take your position.
She likes to point out that college graduates are not just earning more than
their less-educated peers, but the income gap has never been wider between
young college graduates and those who only finished high school:
[http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/02/11/the-rising-cost-
of...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/02/11/the-rising-cost-of-not-going-
to-college/)

I think we can all be angry that most colleges don't measure or seem to care
whether students are better thinkers by the time they graduate. Too many are
interested in funding third-rate research by second-rate academics, too few
are interested in pedagogy and making sure their faculty are good teachers.
Why is the lecture still the core of university teaching when everything we're
discovering about human learning says it's a terrible way to teach anyone
anything?

~~~
EpicEng
Looking at the broad stroke (i.e., median income) can be useful, but if I were
helping my child make this decision, I wouldn't focus on that. Depending on
the career path, income can be highly variable. I also think that these
numbers are skewed by the fact that more and more jobs are requiring degrees
which didn't before.

I would also argue that degrees should not be required for many of these
positions. I mean, a Bachelor's of Hospitality? Restaurant management? Come
on, learn that on the job.

~~~
eastbayjake
The other part I don't like about these conversations is that _I still really
believe that a good college education isn 't about learning a job skill_. It's
the one time in your life that you can think full-time about life's big
questions and devote yourself fully to intellectual curiosity. It's a shame to
use that time to learn about restaurant management.

But it's crazy that it costs $50k/year to read great books and discuss them
with a small group. It's a crazy price if you're intellectually uncurious and
just want to get a job. It's an especially crazy price if you just want to
party and grow up a bit before working.

Our society should have room for both vocational schools and big-picture-
intellectualism schools. It's part of the reason I'm so excited about
developer bootcamps, if only as a model of what adult vocational learning
could look like -- shorter time commitment, much lower cost compared to
university, and a faculty fully devoted to pedagogy and student outcomes. You
should be able to attend a low-cost big-picture-intellectualism school for a
while if you want, then learn vocational skills at another school when you're
ready to work.

~~~
dllthomas
_" Our society should have room for both vocational schools and big-picture-
intellectualism schools."_

Moreover, it should be reasonable for someone to attend _both_.

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

~~~
MCRed
Since government started subsidizing higher eduction by underwriting student
loans, college tuition has risen much faster than inflation, both for private
and public schools.

At the same time, more and more people have gone to college and the value of a
college degree has declined, as more people enter the marketplace with them.

Anecdotally, it appears (from the college graduates I've interviewed) that the
quality of a college education has also declined noticeably in the past 30
years.

All of these are unintended consequences, but not surprising results when you
look at the situation from the perspective of economics.

~~~
cantankerous
True, but when you talk about the perspective of economics, it behooves you to
talk about demand, I think. The broad based demand for a college education is
based on the irrational thinking that so many should have a college education
in order to work, which is pretty much untrue.

It's hard to argue that the quality of a college education has declined when
its purpose has changed. So many folks just need a college degree to remain
competitive, at least on paper, and not much else. I think this is a much more
modern trend.

Perhaps one could make the case that the low cost of a college education
somehow spurred this irrational demand for it. So many people have set off to
set themselves apart with a degree that now only substandard prospective
workers don't have them.

~~~
dikaiosune
Perhaps the demand is irrational, but the effects are very real:

[http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm](http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm)

It would be nice if we could change the fundamental problems underlying that
irrational demand (pre-college schooling which doesn't prepare students for
work, a national obsession with white collar jobs, etc.). However, if I was
staring down a big wealth gap and decided to propose a concrete policy shift
to resolve some of it, I think that it's not a bad idea to get people moved
from the 7-11% unemployment category to the 5.4% unemployment category.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> if I was staring down a big wealth gap and decided to propose a concrete
> policy shift to resolve some of it, I think that it's not a bad idea to get
> people moved from the 7-11% unemployment category to the 5.4% unemployment
> category

Sure, as long as the categories have no content other than an employment
rating, this makes sense. According to the same logic, you could have huge
effects on unemployment by giving black people cosmetic surgery and calling
them white.

~~~
dikaiosune
It's not exactly great that race is a decent predictor of education level[1],
or of income[2], but that doesn't mean that we have to solve the entire race
problem to improve social equality. America has failed miserably for some time
now to "cure" racism[3]. So what's wrong with throwing resources at improving
some of the social factors which contribute to racial/socioeconomic trends?

As an aside, it's a bit simplified and inflammatory to cast this as a
black/white thing. If you insist on boiling this down to only being about race
(a stance I would disagree with), the comparison is much starker when cast as
hispanic/asian[1] or black/asian[2].

[1]
[http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_caa.asp](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_caa.asp)
[2]
[http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0691.p...](http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0691.pdf)
[3] Any contemporary news story about the police in dense urban areas.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> As an aside, it's a bit simplified and inflammatory to cast this as a
> black/white thing.

I agree in a limited way. I was originally going to use forced religious
conversion as my example instead of cosmetic surgery, but I discovered that
while it's easy to find unemployment statistics by race, it's not so easy to
find unemployment statistics by religion.

Regardless -- as far as I can see, you've completely missed the point that
being in a bucket labeled "5.4% unemployment" doesn't necessarily cause people
to personally experience 5.4% unemployment. If it sounds strange to you that a
group of people might develop better employment statistics by having cosmetic
surgery en masse, or by all converting from voodoo to judaism, that should
give you pause before concluding that forced education would have any more
effect than forced conversion.

~~~
dikaiosune
Making it easier/cheaper to get an education != forced education.

Looking at a trend and making a pretty fair assumption about it having
cause/effect tendencies is not "missing the point" of statistics about
employment and education. As far as I can tell, it's the whole reason we
collect them. One does not become employed to become educated, it's the other
way around. Similarly, one does not fail to become educated because one failed
to be employed. There might be less of a connection than some would claim, but
the link is there.

Further, I would be eager to hear about a __practical__ alternative to
improved education for reducing inequality. I'm sure there are some, but I'm
also sure that making sweeping assumptions about the economic viability of
being {religion}/{race}/{insert difference here} doesn't really help anyone
unless there's a magical way to make the human brain more tolerant of
difference. Surely the real solutions to inequality will come from assessing
our weakest points and shoring them up -- education is a pretty weak point in
the US right now.

------
gyardley
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.

------
HamSession
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?

~~~
techsupporter
"...but it has not hurt the economy partially due to federal requirements that
the loan not be discharged."

I'm curious to know what you mean by the requirement that it not be able to be
discharged being beneficial. So far there seem to be three types of student
loan borrowers:

1) Those who can and are paying their loans; 2) Those who got way over their
heads--either through poor borrowing practices or income shortage--and who are
struggling yet still paying their loans instead of creating other economic
activity; 3) Those who can't pay--again, through poor borrowing practices,
income shortage, or some type of major life event--and are now screwed.

The idea behind bankruptcy is to let even the most buried of us be able to at
least partially fill in the hole. That certain classes of loans create a
permanent millstone seems, to me, a bit skewed.

~~~
kevbin
#3s can get their student debt discharged if they can demonstrate undue
hardship:
[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/11/523](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/11/523)

It requires a good attorney & YMMV

~~~
techsupporter
That's theoretically true but for the "good attorney" part. I wonder how many
debtors in that position can afford such an attorney. For example, one
proceeding that took a decade and many hours of pro bono work by a five-star
bankruptcy firm:

[http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/student-loan-
ranger/20...](http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/student-loan-
ranger/2013/06/12/bankruptcy-case-offers-hope-for-student-borrowers)

The 9th Circuit opinion made things a tiny bit better, at least for student
loan debtors in the Pacific time zone (plus Hawaii and Alaska), but the
standard is still exceptionally, almost punitively, high.

------
ForHackernews
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.

~~~
kevbin
> America has been forsaking our commitment to public higher education for
> decades now.

Direct aid to students was flat when adjusted for inflation in the 80s and
90s, but doubled under the second President Bush. The recession & financial
crisis curbed our enthusiasm for Pell grants & whatnot, but funding has
climbed in the last couple years & will again.

In addition the federal government funds university faculty, administrators,
and researchers through the DOD, DOE, NSF, NIH, etc. This funding has fallen
over time as a percentage of GDP, but has increased relative to inflation.

I don't think the US has forsaken its commitment to public education from a
spending standpoint. We have lost track of the purpose and value of education.
Schools today spend a lot of their money on administration and facilities that
do not directly advance research or teaching.

~~~
ForHackernews
You're writing about funding at the federal level (Pell grants, DOE, NSF,
etc.) but traditionally the most important component of public higher
education was state university systems. Until the 1980s, California had world-
class universities (UCLA, UC Berkeley) that were _free_ for any students from
the state.

~~~
kevbin
That's a good point. CA spends less out of its general fund per student in
real dollars than in the 80s. I think "other" accounts for more UC $s than
either general funds or tuition/fees.

The UC's spending tracks the CA economy pretty closely. CA's "world-class
prisons", on the other hand, just keep getting more money in good times & in
bad.

------
phil248
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.

~~~
learc83
>Having said that, I'd rather see a push for universal pre-school education.

Why? Several studies have shown that the initial advantages of pre-school are
gone by 3rd grade.

Here's a quick summary with a link to one of the largest studies commissioned
by the federal government.
[http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/01/09/15headstart.h32...](http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/01/09/15headstart.h32.html)

~~~
phil248
Because of this: "Parents of Head Start participants in the 4-year-old cohort
reported less aggressive behavior in their children at the end of 3rd grade
than did the parents of the other children. For the 3-year-old group, Head
Start parents saw better social skills in their children."

Learning is great. Being sufficiently socialized is more important. I'd like
to see data from when these kids are in their teens or twenties.

------
zaroth
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?

------
diggum
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.

------
gojomo
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.)

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

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

------
KevinEldon
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
Going state-by-state is going to take decades. The 'laboratories of democracy'
thing is extremely overrated, oftentimes you just end up with 51 hills to
climb. 'That may work for them over in _____, but it's not how we do things in
______!' It's not like US politicians (or voters) are famed for their
analytical rigor and intolerance for logical/rhetorical fallacies.

~~~
tartuffe78
And federal programs take effect quicker, but trying to balance the realities
and concerns of all 50 states, and getting enough politicians and special
interests on board results in bloated systems that are easier to abuse.

------
lchengify
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act)

[2] [http://www.ibtimes.com/us-17th-global-education-ranking-
finl...](http://www.ibtimes.com/us-17th-global-education-ranking-finland-
south-korea-claim-top-spots-901538)

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

------
mysteriouswasp
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.

~~~
joezydeco
It's probably not a coincidence that Obama is going to announce this plan in
Tennessee. The Republican governor of Tennessee, Bill Haslam, has made
affordable college a key part of his platform.

One comment I've read today sums it up: _" Watching [Obama] co-opt the crown
jewel of Haslam's 2020 or 2024 presidential run is so, so beautiful"_

------
jqm
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.

~~~
learc83
Most community colleges don't offer anything as specialized as _Survey of Late
20th Century Post-Grunge Tribal Tattoos_.

Community colleges usually just take care of general education classes--like
English Composition, College Algebra, Calculus, and History.

I'm sure there are some nonsense classes, but there isn't much room for
specialization in a 2 year degree.

~~~
jqm
[http://nypost.com/2014/01/30/rutgers-university-offers-
class...](http://nypost.com/2014/01/30/rutgers-university-offers-class-on-
beyonce/)

I'm sure you are mostly correct. My concern is that given free subsistence, I
believe the plague of nonsense will grow. I also believe that paying for
something is a way to give it value to those who pay. I don't see high school
being very highly valued by most kids. And their valuation is probably not far
from fair either.

This article does very well at summing up some of my observations...

[http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2734](http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2734)

------
hodwik
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.

~~~
learc83
>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.

Community college professors aren't generally unionized. They're definable not
part of public school teachers unions your talking about.

