BUT OF COURSE: Obama’s College Plan Bows to Elites.
The major barriers to completing college do not include community-college tuition, which is low for everyone, and basically free for low-income families (you automatically qualify for a Pell Grant if your family income is less than $24,000 a year, and many others qualify above that line). Libby Nelson offers the wan defense that universal programs may enjoy greater support than those targeted at the poor, which would be more compelling if community college weren’t already basically free for low-income families. . . .
I suspect that this plan will mostly help subsidize people who could have afforded tuition on their own, while encouraging marginally attached students to stay enrolled. It’s not the worst way to spend government money, but in a world of limited resources, it’s probably not the way I’d choose to spend that money. Especially since community college completion rates, while hard to calculate, seem to be pretty unimpressive; five years after enrolling, only 25 percent of people had an associate or four-year degree. Another 11 percent had certificates, some of which may be economically valuable, but even if you add in those numbers, that’s still a pretty dismal record.
Of course, community colleges are often dealing with the most challenging students. More than 50 percent of community-college enrollees require remedial work, and of those, more than 40 percent never even complete their remedial courses.
Taking people who shouldn’t have graduated high school, and sending them to colleges they aren’t ready to attend.
Plus: “What if people in the policy elite stopped assuming that the ideal was to make everyone more like them, and started thinking about making society more hospitable to those who aren’t? . . . I would argue instead that what’s elitist is our current fixation on college. It starts from the supposition that being good at school is some sort of great personal virtue, so that any suggestion that many people aren’t good at school must mean that those people are not equal and valuable members of society. And that supposition is triple-distilled balderdash.”