Since I live in an area where community college tuition is currently free, I’d like to speak to this. It’s fairly easy to restrict who gets this benefit after the first semester – all you have to do is insist that students maintain a certain GPA and make satisfactory progress toward graduation. (This isn’t a perfect solution, since, as a few other people have pointed out, this means that students receiving the benefit are disproportionately those who with adequate academic preparation and a reasonably stable life – but identifying and cutting off students who are not taking advantage of the education they’re being offered isn’t particularly difficult from a logistical point of view.)
This is what they did to people at the University of Kansas. if you were not making progress, meaning taking certain number of hours and getting a certain GPA, you were asked to leave.
No, you were not told, you were asked.
Now many people (like me) took that advice and left with our tails between our legs. I went back to a community college, worked on the basics, and then went back to KU and did fine.
The problem with free college is that it doesn’t actually solve the real issue. Employers are not using degrees to rule out the uneducated, but rather the undesirable. The education is irrelevant. For instance, being an administrative assistant where I work now requires an Associates Degree. Why? There aren’t true skills being conveyed by an AA that a high school graduate should not possess. It’s answering phones and scheduling meetings with occasional dictation duties. This shouldn’t and doesn’t require two years of post-secondary education. What the AA requirement does though is weed out the lower classes (and I would even go so far as to say minority applicants in many cases) and the unambitious.
What this means (and we’re already seeing it happen) is that as degrees become more common, they become less useful as tools to weed out the poor and minorities from applicant pools, so the educational requirements get raised. I’m in a department where 6 of 8 people have doctorates for a job that 30 years ago required a high school education. Providing free college doesn’t do anything except shift the bar.
And you’d limit access, like they do in Europe. No doubt some people blocked from free college whose parents have money will go to paid ones, which is fine with me. I know community colleges would be covered by this plan - I’d hope certified trade schools would be also.
There is plenty of absenteeism in the work place also. Some students skip too many classes, some workers watch youtube videos all day. (We had a thread about that.) It happens. Not a reason to make it sound like all students or all workers are goof offs.
The two good things about this proposal are that it lets kids go to the best college they can get into, not the best they can afford or think they can afford, and it removes the sword of student loan repayments hanging over their heads.
Sure it costs money. So does new tanks and planes, and we seem to have plenty for them, don’t we?
Today there is a disincentive to kicking out students not making it, which is that you don’t get their tuition money. This is especially prevalent in the ripoff for profit colleges. If the government didn’t pay for those not making progress, it would pay the colleges to offer more counseling or to kick them out. Big plus for everyone.
As we’ve seen, scholarships are not so easy. Loans you can get - and then have them hanging over your head forcing you to take the jobs needed to pay the loans, not taking your best career path.
My loans were deferred until after I finished grad school which was a big help. They also got repaid after the period of 10% inflation or more, which really helped.
And I’m sure some qualified people do not try to get into schools which they think are too expensive, which hurts everyone.
Cooper Union in New York used to be a free college also. They had a rigorous set of tests after you qualified with good enough SAT scores. I got in, but I went to MIT instead because it was much better. I was lucky in that we could afford it. My career would have been much worse going to Cooper Union - which is a great school, just not as good as MIT.
It’s complicated. Gregory Clark found similarly low mobility regardless of country, social policy, or time period. He didn’t look at Norway but did look at Sweden.
And it depends a bit on how you measure mobility. We have very high income inequality here. A change in income that can boost you from the lowest income quintile to the highest in some northern european countries will only bring you to about average income here.
Tuition prices here are heavily dependent on income. Sticker prices are high, but the higher sticker price school may be a lower net price school.
The real issue isn’t the kids whose parents have money going to other colleges, the real issue is that while this might help shore up the middle class, many of the kids who don’t qualify are going to be poor and/or minority. And they’ve usually had the deck stacked against them to start with. The idea of limiting access further stacks that deck.
And yet it isn’t fair to the low end of the middle class - who make too much to qualify for grants and for whom even $6k a year for a public school tuition is still out of reach - to keep the aid levels so low that free aid really applies only for such a small subset.
But it isn’t fair that someone should get to go to college for free when mom and dad are middle class and are leasing new cars every two years and have been since the kids were born, and have put a year of college tuition into Dance and Travelling Basketball and just spend $80k putting granite countertops and new cabinets into their kitchen and spend every penny they make (my neighbors who lobby for free college tuition). I really don’t feel like subsidizing someone’s six years of gymnastics and annual vacations growing up because they can’t be bothered to save. If you decided to have the kids, and you are well off enough to “afford” them - college should be your responsibility.
Today the deck is stacked against them for those reasons and money. This would at least eliminate the money issue. And I’m definitely in favor of programs to raise the level of incoming students - which should start long before college age, of course.
That type of person likes to send their kids to community colleges not for the education benefit but to save money. And some parent seem to think that having kids pay for college themselves builds character or something. I’m with you that parents should pay if they can, but today the ones getting screwed are not the parents but the kids.
FAFSA forms assume parents are going to pay - I filled in my income on the 8 I did - but can’t make parents pay.
That seems to be between you and your parents. I’m not sure what anyone else has to do with that problem.
Having free college would have meant that his parents wouldn’t have screwed him over so much.
I understand, I’m in the same situation. I couldn’t get any financial aid, as my parents made too much, but they refused to help with tuition costs, so I didn’t go until I was 25.
They weren’t cheap, they were just assholes.
Scholarships aren’t that easy. A handful of students out of the millions get as ‘free’ education. It’s apparent the students who do have to pay - by taking loans, or working their way through, or use family savings - are subsidizing them.
It does hurt everyone - what possible benefit to society or the nation to make education hard to get a chance at, and saddle most graduates with onerous debts?
The ‘competition’? :smack:
I had no problem. My kids had no problem. But you seem to think that parents should be obligated to pay, and many parents disagree with you. (Not this one.) The question is what about the kids screwed by this parental opinion?
Ahh! My parents didn’t screw me over. The loan repayment system was a lot more forgiving when I went through it, and by the time I had to pay the loans back I had a good job. It was pre-computer, and after two years of filling out the multiple page forms my father decided it was easier to just pay.
But I know plenty of kids for whom it is a problem. None of them majored in basket weaving.
Everyone knows it’s paid for by taxes - the real issue is we often would rather spend the money negatively than positively, or evenly cross communities. Money for schools in bad neighborhoods? No way! Money to imprison the kids from those areas after the schools have failed them? No problem! The average annual cost to send someone to college locally is ~$10,000. The average annual cost to keep someone in prison is ~$31,000. Americans will cheerfully pay the latter, and freak about their tax dollars going to the former, despite the fact their own kids would get the same deal.