While some argue that free tuition for upper- and middle-class students is a waste of resources, in fact it is in everyone’s interest to ensure that community colleges are socioeconomically integrated.... [W]ealthy students outnumber poor students at the most selective four-year colleges by 14 to one, while community colleges educate twice as many low-income students as high-income students....
[T]he growing number of low-income and working-class students in community colleges has been associated with reduced educational expectations and a less-rigorous curriculum.... As economic segregation rises in community colleges, students are less likely to be surrounded by well-prepared middle-class classmates who model academic success.
The Obama proposal could begin an important process of reversing the negative effects of socioeconomic segregation in higher education... [L]et’s see whether expanding universal public education to the two-year sector will, in the end, begin to reduce higher education’s economic divide and strengthen community colleges to become the engines of social mobility they were designed to be.
January 13, 2015
"The Genius of Obama's Two-Year College Proposal/The plan's potential to promote socioeconomic and racial integration is critical to advancing higher education."
Richard Kahlenberg in The Atlantic:
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The process of turning community college into the last two years of a high school education continues apace. I'd challenge someone with an associates degree earned today at your average community college to measure up to someone with only a high school diploma in 1960. Free community college is a Band-Aid on the problem that K-12 education is in a shambles. A multi-billion dollar Band-Aid, at that.
Nonsense. Many high-schools are racially and economically integrated (my kids went to one in Ann Arbor) -- but by the end of the 4 years, kids in the opposite ends of the spectrum take completely different courses and barely see one another.
If you had the 'AP kids' taking a couple of years of community college courses before heading off to the U, they'd be in the CC 'honors track' and things would remain as stratified as ever.
And four-year universities would hate this, BTW. Those big lecture courses they herd underclassmen into generate a lot of tuition revenue at very little cost. Also -- who would fill up all those dorms if underclassmen started doing their first two years in CC?
Sigh. In the 1970s, any ethnic minority with a modicum of ambition could easily find funding for higher education. Further, tuition and fees were low enough at many state schools to allow a person to work their way through. Fast forward to 2015 and here we are thinking that making it "free" will make the desired ethnics want to go to school. Will. Not. Happen. Give it another 40 years and progressives will finally realize that it is just easier to award the credential with no expenditure of funds or effort. And the good folks at Wisconsin won't have to worry about racial disparity in grading in math and science! Just award every negro applicant a Ph.D. in Physics. Good for racial parity, good for self-esteem. But the term "applicant" implies that a potential doctoral candidate would possibly have to complete an application form. I see potential racial disparity in the effort required to do that. I await a progressive solution.
Community college is already free. Pell grants cover most of the cost of the school. Success at CC is really up to the student. The drop out rate is extremely high. Guess what happens to that Pell grant when you flunk out. I really think CC offers the best mix of resources, risks and rewards. Free CC would create two more years of public school
"[L]et’s see whether pumping billions into universal public education to the two-year sector will, in the end, begin to reduce higher education’s economic divide"
California did this back in the day--free community college for everyone. My wife actually taught in the system while she was getting a PhD at UC San Diego.
It was, of course, a failure. Low IQ, unmotivated students who were illiterative in their native Spanish and who spoke fractured English.
If anything, there are far too many students of all kinds in college; at least half and maybe three-quarters don't belong. And minorities are way over represented. Once again, our Ruling Class, mired in delusion and superstition and treason doesn't get it.
Of course, if you're a crypto-Muslim like Obama, and your fundamental transformation is to create a totalitarian, socialist, Muslim state, the plan looks pretty good.
"Second, the high interest suggests some middle-class and wealthy families whose children would have otherwise attended four-year colleges may be giving two-year institutions a second look."
No, this is where the whole argument falls apart. Reducing the cost of the lowest cost college choice simply provides more even more marginal students to attend college without much financial risk.
How bright to you have to be to write such crap? How about they require some economics courses in journalism school?
Great. Obama is trying to buy back the lower middle class that has been hurt so badly by his economic policies that many of them moved to the GOP in the last election. And, as usual, he is doing it with our grand kids' and great grand kids' money, after almost single handedly doubling the national debt.
How about they require some economics courses in journalism school?
The writer is discussing an article of leftist faith, not economics.
First heathcare, now education. They don't care if they destroy our institutions and our economic viability on their great 'fairness' experiments.
While some argue that free tuition for upper- and middle-class students is a waste of resources, in fact it is in everyone’s interest to ensure that community colleges are socioeconomically integrated...
Bring back the draft!
We need to force the wealthy and the middle class to attend community colleges!
[W]ealthy students outnumber poor students at the most selective four-year colleges by 14 to one, while community colleges educate twice as many low-income students as high-income students...
Something that obviously will be "fixed" by making 2 year colleges less costly!
[T]he growing number of low-income and working-class students in community colleges has been associated with reduced educational expectations and a less-rigorous curriculum...
...by people like the author, who have two degrees from Harvard and make their money on the academic/foundation/think tank circuit.
As economic segregation rises in community colleges, students are less likely to be surrounded by well-prepared middle-class classmates who model academic success.
I must have missed the two year community college on the author's CV.
[L]et’s see whether expanding universal public education to the two-year sector will, in the end, begin to reduce higher education’s economic divide and strengthen community colleges to become the engines of social mobility they were designed to be.
...because it worked so well for the K-12 system! (Whatever happened to CCNY and CUNY, by the way?)
Let's be clear about one thing: this proposal is a dagger at the heart of private, for-profit education of all stripes, which tends to compete for the same student body. Alternatives to the educational establishment must not be tolerated!
This is pure wishful thinking. CC tuition is hardly the barrier for people going to those colleges--it's already the cheapest deal if you want to get some core cirriculum classes out of the way. And if it did encourage more competitive students into CCs, wouldn't that create more segregation within the CC itself as the weaker students sink to the bottom?
Besides, every time the government has pumped more subsidies into education they've made it more expensive (as prices rise with more demand and more ability to pay). I could see CCs starting to let their fees creep up as they see more students who can pay them--and they try to attract students with more amenities (there's always more amenities when the money flows in). I don't see how any of this helps cost control.
Not that it matters--Obama has to get this through Congress, and I don't see that happening.
My rebuttal? "Bullshit."
I win.
That which people don't pay for, they don't value.
I think it ironic that the same Obama who wants the public to pay for 2 years of CC (Free!), is the guy who blocks initiatives to improve primary and secondary schools for people in poverty stricken areas (charter schools, vouchers for private schools).
This program isn't really about ensuring quality educational opportunity.
People like Obama and the author of this piece don't care if our institutions and services are cr*p, they just want to make sure they are controlling the money and the decisions. And the people.
An open ended commitment that would lead to an endless proliferation of community colleges with ever greater buildings, expanded administrative staffs, and "educators," while not providing any measurable improvement to the level of education.
Viz., the existing programs for Federal funding of higher education (and K-12, for that matter).
McCardle summarized it well:
Whether or not you think this program is a good idea depends on what you think the effects will be. Will it primarily:
Offer a subsidy to middle-class kids who don't really need the money?
Encourage middle-class families to transfer their kids to community college for the first two years of school, and thus help to moderate college costs?
Encourage financially constrained students who might not have gone to college to enter the system en route to a degree?
Encourage marginal students with a low chance of completing a career-enhancing degree to attend school, mostly wasting government money and their own time?
Obviously, effects #2 and #3 are more attractive as a policy goal than effects #1 and #4.
Oso Negro said...
And the good folks at Wisconsin won't have to worry about racial disparity in grading in math and science! Just award every negro applicant a Ph.D. in Physics
Make the analogy hurt more. instead of physics, let's talk Med school :)
Just another tax on the middle class.
They think there are no black people at CCs? WTF? Have they ever visited a campus?
Why not call Obama's latest gimmick what it really is> It's yet another in a long line of welfare programs to transfer wealth from taxpayers to recipients and cronies. Give everyone free community college for two years and watch the prices skyrocket. After all, it's free so who has to worry about how much it costs? Plus, 25% of the funding has to come from the states, so this is yet another unfunded federal mandate. States just love those.
Why does he think the rich kids are going to community college?
Jobs program for adjuncts.
Are there really a substantial number of people not going to college because of the cost of tuition? I find that hard to believe. When I was in high school, in the late 90's, my family certainly did not have the money for college, but I never questioned a bit whether or not I would get to go. I got a really great scholarship (to the state U), but if I hadn't gotten that one, there were a huge number of smaller ones that covered most or all of CC or public U tuition for almost any student who had reasonable grades. Since then, the push for college and the availability of scholarships (my state has a lottery scholarship now) has only gotten greater.
It seems to me that people don't go to college because they don't want to, or it's not in their culture, or the allure of a full-time paycheck is too great, or they have family responsibilities that make it hard, or similar. Poverty plays a huge role in those, but it's not about tuition costs. I find it hard to believe that anyone in the past couple decades has said "I would really like to go to college, but I just can't pay for tuition."
This is another example of privileged people who never faced poverty trying to decide what is holding poor people back, without ever actually bothering to learn about their lives.
I had to go to the article itself to see what it could possible be thinking. I found this.
"it is in everyone’s interest to ensure that community colleges are socioeconomically integrated. We have known since Brown v. Board of Education that separate educational institutions for black and white—or for poor and rich—are rarely equal."
This is a colossal non-sequitor. First, community colleges are not "separate for blacks and whites" now and could never be. Period. Jim Crow is dead. As to being more fully equalized racially or socioeconomically (a totally different matter), it has been crystal clear since the Coleman Report of 1965, that such integration has little to no effect on achievement. Sorry, but it is just not relevant to raising anyone's levels of learning.
But the larger issue is why is our society so wedded to one way of preparing youth for adult roles - schooling in full-time liberal arts oriented educational institutions? The people this writer is concerned about need opportunities, not schools. And the two are NOT the same thing. Yes, they need various forms of preparation, skills training, etc. But they also need far freer access and entry points to far more jobs (freer and easier for both themselves and those employing them, including their own ability to form businesses of their own). Yes, they do also need education for their overall human and civic development. But good high schools is where to give them that. Otherwise, this latest phase of dumping more money into more forms of schooling in the hope something sticks is wasteful beyond belief.
Big houses and fancy cars should be paid for by someone else, er, I mean big houses and fancy cars should be "free", too, because people who live in big houses and drive fancy cars usually have more money than people who don't.
As economic segregation rises in community colleges, students are less likely to be surrounded by well-prepared middle-class classmates who model academic success.
Actually they'll tend to be dumber and stay dumber regardless of who surrounds them.
MarkW said...
but by the end of the 4 years, kids in the opposite ends of the spectrum take completely different courses and barely see one another.
Quite so, e.g., "Chinese Girl in the Ghetto.
Some ideas are so stupid you have to be a professional educator (or journalist) to believe them. With apologies to Orwell, I think.
I'm guessing O and Richard Kahlenberg missed the "no free lunch" lecture.
I Mass Governor Mini Me (now mercifully departed)wanted to raise the school leaving age to 18. Good idea, Deval!
The genius of Obama's two-year college plan...
...is that it will distract impacted Millenials from the,cancellations, auto-renewal downgrades, premium spikes, and in-network access eeductions of their 2015 Obamacare plans.
Bonus goody is that it will give the Palace Media a SQUIRREL!! issue that will crowd out what would otherwise be Obamacare #FAIL coverage.
Walker, among others, has championed job retraining at CC's to fill our 'skills gap'.
How he can both criticize free CC but ask for tax dollars for job-retraining (aka CC free for selected fields) will be interesting to see.
It seems like Obama is stealing that point away from these GOP governors who have championed job retraining at CC's. Pundits might not care, but it's hard to give speeches about jobs while hating on both Universities and Community Collecges.
Let's see - the schools get money based on their enrollments. The offer applies to students who maintain a minimum GPA (2.75 I believe). Fall below and the schools get dinged on that reimbursement money. I can guarantee that grade inflation, already a problem, will be exacerbated at the community college level in an effort to keep as much cash coming in as possible.
"Are there really a substantial number of people not going to college because of the cost of tuition? I find that hard to believe."
Certainly not CC--the tuition there can be easily paid for with a part time job (and in some places it's free).
A lot of private schools are very expensive now--I was shocked to see my alma mater now charges about $60K a year just in tuition (it was about $20K a year when I attended in the '90s). Loans cover a lot of that, and scholarships for some, but the high debt load may disincentivize students who at least have other options.
Rather than push the "get everyone into college" idea, how about doing more so that people without college degrees have better job opportunities (to say nothing of those WITH college degrees--it's much harder these days for even BAs to find work that will be enough to pay down their loans).
At the risk of repeating what's been said already:
In the first place, community college tuition is already so much lower than that of a 4-year school that it's to a student's financial advantage to attend there first, then transfer -- but most middle-class students decline.
(There are exceptions. In my own family, my brother wasn't really ready for college, so he attended the local "only chance college" for two years, transferred to a respectable state school, and is now doing quite well for himself.)
Is "free community college tuition" going to do the trick? I doubt it. There's more than just money involved. Academically, sure, at a community college, you can take a combination of introductory classes in your field of study and classes that will count for electives/general education requirements, that will enable you to transfer successfully, especially if the schools have an agreement worked out, but you miss the greater variety of classes available -- not to mention, of course, the perks of living on-campus.
And if it did -- if rather than bringing students who don't attend at all (who already have the benefit of Pell Grants, tax credits, and other financial aid), it takes students from 4-year schools, then that'd be a fairly disruptive thing, with overcapacity there and undercapacity elsewhere.
And that doesn't even address the students who use a community college as a place for career training, a two-year certificate of some kind. Yet even here, "free tuition" isn't the answer. When I was at home with my sons when they were little and had the TV on in the daytime, there were constantly advertisements for such places as Westwood College of Business. The fact that private, for-profit colleges are able to find students indicates that community colleges already have deficits in this "vocational school" aspect -- whether it's not covering all fields of study, not having enough seats available, or not having the sort of curriculum and career counseling that actually gets students a job when they get out. So just sending more students their way (with the command by the feds: "improve your programs or lose your cash") isn't going to fix this. (Or maybe there isn't anything to be fixed; you get what you pay for, and if these for-profit schools are able to do a better job, then why not?)
Two other thoughts:
First, the pilot program that the president is touting hasn't even been implemented yet -- it goes into effect in the fall of 2015, for this year's high school seniors.
And second, a lot of what community colleges are trying to do wouldn't even be necessary if high schools were up to scratch. My pet program that I'd like to see is for the mandate of high schools to encompass all "secondary-education level" material, regardless of the students' age, so that if a kid makes it to age 18 and accumulates sufficient "credits" to meet graduation requirements, but isn't actually ready for college work, the high school has to offer the "remedial" courses instead of the college. (Look at the community college course catalog -- the math practically starts with arithmetic!) And, similarly, if a kid has made is way through with no interest in the vocational-ed programs, he can join up later. Or maybe even a kid who wasn't ready for AP-level courses as a senior can take them as a sort of 13th grade.
http://janetheactuary.blogspot.com/2015/01/free-community-college.html
The only way to make sense out of this proposal (other than the always seductive Politics of Free Stuff) is to assume it's a jobs program for those who are, or who want to be, employed by the community colleges.
It makes sense when one realizes that community colleges are becoming the new post-high-school public school, complete with teachers unions and automatic tenure.
It's a jobs program for low-talent people who'd really appreciate a lifetime sinecure, and (should it come to pass) can be expected to vote appreciatively.
(And in the unlikely event that it does pass, Stage Two would be grants for money to live on while attending those community colleges, up to some limit of, oh, perhaps six years or age 26?)
So why would we want to make some of value worthless by making it "free"?
Also, has there been any thought as the quality of student and the resulting drop in standards if everyone goes, much less the infrastructure needed to handle all of these students? This sounds like a proposal more tailored to win those deranged souls who put up with adjuncting in search of that tenure track professorship.
Revenues for my local community college is comprised of:
Feds 32%
State 22%
Local Prop Tax 25%
Tuition 12%
Other 9%
I support community colleges, but the public is already on the hook for the cost. College should never be a free handout. Tuition share of the cost seems fair.
I have 18 trillion reasons why it's probably not a great idea.
The genius of Obama's two-year college plan is that it's a squirrel
As will many bright, unchallenged upper-middle-class young men, my son flunked out of his elite, Eastern University his freshman year. Wasted a $30,000 fellowship and $25,000 of our money. His grades were so bad the local campus of the state University suggested he go to CC to bring himself up to the required 2.0 for transfer student applicants.
Humbled, he enrolled in CC full-time and worked 20 hours weekly while living in his old bedroom, subject to our house rules. Credit to him. He carefully structured courses that would transfer into the University system and to meet the curriculum area requirements. We were horrified to learn that he attended classes and did homework in the library but rarely had a need to do more than take quizzes. Attendance counted for 25% of the grade in most classes.
Imagine our surprise midway through his third semester to learn the state has a foreign exchange program for its community colleges: the top 25 students by GPA are invited to attend a similar college in England for a semester. We of course underwrote that expense as recognition of his work and success.
Never try to convince me that white children of married, working parents who speak well, behave themselves and have a store of learned values to draw on do not have a HUGE ADVANTAGE over everyone else.
On second thought, this ends the gravy train for four year colleges who take student loan money from students who drop out after their first or second year.
That's a good thing.
Another good thing: fewer students at four year colleges who should not be there. It doesn't waste their time and money, and it doesn't dumb down the classes.
So, basically, since there is no way this will get through Congress, it's a trivially easy way to slur the GOP as "anti-education, especially for poor people" in front of people who can't be bothered to understand costs, benefits, and, dare I say it, nuance.
Incidentally, I don't mean to pile on here -- my husband and I have already discussed that there's a good chance any one of our kids could end up at a community college, because there are too many kids who simply can't make it on their own, living in a dorm, turning down parties to study.
Many high-schools are racially and economically integrated (my kids went to one in Ann Arbor) -- but by the end of the 4 years, kids in the opposite ends of the spectrum take completely different courses and barely see one another.
So true. You could get a decent education at my high school or you could get a terrible one. It was all in what classes you took.
Pell grants cover most of the cost of the school. Success at CC is really up to the student. The drop out rate is extremely high. Guess what happens to that Pell grant when you flunk out.
My brother did a stint at CC and said there was a day when people would cash out their grants and stop going to school or drop out or something. So it’s already being used wastefully, let’s just throw more money at it.
Now if they had gone the Mike Rowe route and started throwing money at people who went into trades (welding, AC, even cooking) that might be useful. But just for random classes? It’s going to be high school number 2 for people who weren’t very good at high school 1 and people who would have gone to a four year college using the opportunity to get some classes out of the way for free (which will lead to a lot of four year institutions not accepting some of the 2 year school classes, as that seems to be the trend).
Oh, and more stray thoughts: back at my high school job, there were a couple girls who moved from high school to community college with exactly this "no idea what I want to do, no interest in figuring it out, either" approach. Solidly middle class, but just didn't really think for themselves.
After a year, one, then the other, found out about a program to train to become travel agents -- back in the pre-internet days, when this seemed like the perfect career for them.
The Obama proposal could begin an important process of reversing the negative effects of socioeconomic segregation in higher education...
Sorry, such socialist engineering is not the purpose of higher education. That equates the program with 'free' preschool and forced busing and remedial courses which should have been learned in high school.
You get what your pay for.
for almost any student who had reasonable grades.
Their idea of 'reasonable' grades is much lower than yours, I suspect. IE, people who probably should be getting jobs, because they are either not working hard enough to get good grades or just not capable.
Or as I said, some of them should be going into trades. I didn't really get that when I was in high school but I do now.
It's a diversion.
Elementary and secondary education is still failing poor black kids (and many whites and not so poor blacks.) Over a half century of intervention by federal power and academic theory have improved nothing, leaving several exertions ill educated for the world they are entering.
Having failed, they now think they can help the products of their failure by intervening in the community college system, a mixed success but (except for schools in pockets of affluence) the only remaining group relatively independent of federal and elite academic influence or control.
They do this by throwing money at these institutions, not via any programatic innovation. But surely control of the programs will follow the money, and we have seen what the result of that is.
doesn't seem like a legitimate government interest to me.
This is no more a legitimate federal government concern than what kind of toilets or lightbulbs we have in our homes.
Not too many of my son's fellow graduates chose the community college route, but those who did uniformly complain about the difficulty of getting the classes they need to get their AA degrees in three years, much less two. How is making it 'free' going to change that?
I recall reading somewhere that the longer you spend in CC, the less likely you will transfer to a 4 year school.
Many high-schools are racially and economically integrated (my kids went to one in Ann Arbor) -- but by the end of the 4 years, kids in the opposite ends of the spectrum take completely different courses and barely see one another.
So true. You could get a decent education at my high school or you could get a terrible one. It was all in what classes you took.
This was my experience, too. Even though I lived in a small town and went to a small school, I recall sometimes going to assemblies and other events with the "masses" and my friends and I would realize that we had no idea who most of the people we saw were. I probably didn't have a single class with half or more of my classmates, but had a dozen or more classes with the same 20-30 kids.
(That's not entirely a bad thing - I was utterly miserable in classes that weren't tracked, and got nothing out of them.)
Shanna said: Their idea of 'reasonable' grades is much lower than yours, I suspect. IE, people who probably should be getting jobs, because they are either not working hard enough to get good grades or just not capable.
Oh, definitely. The lottery scholarship kicks in at a C average, and quite frankly, if you can't get that in a standard public school around here, then you are either not putting in any effort whatsoever, or you have a severe learning disability.
Incidentally, I don't mean to pile on here -- my husband and I have already discussed that there's a good chance any one of our kids could end up at a community college, because there are too many kids who simply can't make it on their own, living in a dorm, turning down parties to study.
My brother (honors student in high school) went that route and took most of his general courses at a community college in the Twin Cities before transferring to the U of MN and getting his bachelor’s degree in engineering. He had nearly a 4.0 GPA when he transferred in, benefitted from the smaller class sizes and spent a fraction of what the U charged. Also by living at home he saved almost as much on living expenses even with having to commute to school. Assuming that the community college has good instructors and the four year school accepts the transfers, I’d say that’s a pretty smart move and one that I wish I’d made.
Kahlenberg and The Atlantic have both drunk the Kool-Aid.
"Free" as in: I have to pay for it. Sorry; no sale.
I probably didn't have a single class with half or more of my classmates, but had a dozen or more classes with the same 20-30 kids.
My graduating class was around 500 and we were the 'small' class (ie, the ones ahead and behind had 800 or so). I had the same classes with a rotation of the same 50 kids over and over again, with a few exceptions like band.
Extending grade school to college is not reform. The most expensive education system in the world, and a product not even in the top 10, excluding liberal education. Also, as with the Obamacare financial policy, which raised the poverty level, it is detached from economic development.
Anyway, unaffordable medical care, housing, education, food, energy, etc. seems to be the Democrat policy. Once the problem has been created, they can then offer "solutions" that redistribute costs to a national (and international) base. They don't like to pay for the upkeep of their "back yards". Well, not with actual wealth, they prefer leverage.
Community college is already super-cheap compared to most 4-year colleges. If price were the main determinant of the haute bourgeoisie enrolling their sons and daughters at community colleges, they'd be doing it already. They're not, and it's not. Knocking a couple thousand dollars off community college tuition won't help overcome the prestige gap -- if anything, it will make it worse.
Sorry, I stopped reading after "the genius of Obama's..."
This idea is awfully close to Mickey Kaus' about equality in the public sphere, no? Kaus still does Bloggingheads, I think, maybe he and Prof A should discuss that? In this book The End of Equality (if I remember correctly) he called for more mixing between economically stratified group in public spaces (post office, etc) as a better solution to the actual problems of inequality (as opposed to crude measures of income inequality), etc. I haven't seen Kaus' take on the President's proposal yet, though.
My high school class (in a suburb of Albany, NY) was about 450-475 kids. I knew about half of them in one way or another, but the other half were a mystery. There was one hallway on the second floor in the south wing of the school that my friends and I referred to as "the ghetto". This hallway was where all the kids my friends and I didn't know had their classes: remedial math, remedial English, African history, and of course, the truant officer's room/detention room. My circle included mostly white and Asian kids, but there were two black boys as well, both very bright (and not just the "smart, for a black" kind of bright).
None of us set foot in that wing of the school during our whole time there, except for a few after-school detentions here and there for cutting class or using our lunch period to walk to the mall next door to the school. Looking back, it seems our school identified the kids who were there to learn, even just a little, and the kids who were there to goof off and be babysat, relatively early. That was the only segregation I could see.
I'm sure the fact that the ghetto wing was about 70% black in a school that was otherwise about 80% white was just a coincidence. I'm sure of that.
It will make community college costs soar, so you're going to get hammered in the second two years or for all years if you don't qualify for the free ones.
Also, is community college cost really a problem? I know multiple formerly poor people who stopped being poor by starting an education at community college.
Our local community college costs $75 per credit hour, so a one semester class would be $225. I'd say community colleges are doing a fantastic job of making things affordable.
On second thought, this ends the gravy train for four year colleges who take student loan money from students who drop out after their first or second year.
That's a good thing.
I do like that.
A lame duck President faced with a House and Senate controlled by an opposition party he has spent six years shitting on... hm.
I'm sure his latest "proposal" is super duper important and smart, but who gives a rat's ass? He's got better odds of being voted MVP in the Super Bowl than he does of getting his agenda through Congress.
It won't promote those ends.
First, relatively few (around 25%) of CC students get an AA degree even after 5 years. Here in the Chicago City Colleges the average number of AA's awarded every year is around 8% of the enrollment - I don't know how long they stuck around to get it.
Second - what are the actual numbers of AA holders who then use them to get a job? As opposed to people who, say, go to a trade school or get an apprenticeship?
These guys love to float all these high-sounding propositions. But they are always short on data, and when you look at the data it shows that their proposals are unrealistic.
As economic segregation rises in community colleges, students are less likely to be surrounded by well-prepared middle-class classmates who model academic success.
This is what's known as "acting white" - and it's generally viewed as a model of what not to do.
My 20-year old is currently on Year 3 of his CC career. Due to class scheduling, getting the AA in his major (Computer Animation) completed in the "standard" two years is a practical impossibility. The fact that he spent the first year getting his shit together figures into this, of course...
He'll graduate in June with a double major in CA and Art. What's an AA in Art worth? Absolutely nothing, but it's what you get for completing the undergrad prerequisites he needs when he transfers into the Cal State system in the fall. Better to take them for free at the CC level now.
The hope is that having a couple AAs while pursuing an actual, useable education will make him somewhat employable in the interim...
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/01/dropouts_are_the_real_problem.html
I read something recently that said high achievers think specific skills are important for success and low achievers think general education is important for success. My organization hires people with many skill sets. We expect engineers to have degrees, and we know which engineering schools are top-tier and which are not. I can't think of any job we have where an Associate's degree would look better than two years of serving customers somewhere.
It so happens that I took a calculus class at a community college and later took the "equivalent" class at a university with a top-tier engineering program. I saw the difference in expectations first-hand.
You know how you can tell our public health clinics suck? Rich and middle-class folks don't use them. You can go to the free clinic for just about anything (not just STD's) and see a doctor or nurse practitioner - for free! But rich and middle-class folks don't go. They go and pay for medical service. Why do you think that might be?
Obambis proposal is not about helping anyone, promoting anything except infiltrating the federal government into something that is controlled and taxed locally. It is all about federal control. And I will have none of it.
The stupidity of this linked article is mind-bending.
Of course it's genius, just like allowing 26 year olds to stay on their parents' health insurance or not allowing insurers to price for pre-existing conditions.
But that genius only holds for as long as no one talks about what it actually costs, and who pays those costs.
but if you can get kids to go to two more years of public high school, without learning grown-up skills, you have 2 more years to indoctrinate them.
RecChief:
The inviolable principles of cause and effect have been reversed. As well as the laws of supply and demand suspended indefinitely.
It's ingenious, really. They create the problems, treat the symptoms at progressive costs, then offer a solution that ignores or shifts the causes. It creates a perception of goodwill that many people will acknowledge without discernment.
That said, the interests are overlapping and even convergent. It may be impossible to unwind their ball of yarns without another "reset". Hopefully, people will stop consuming the opiates, and will recognize that they have been deceived, but that is an unlikely outcome.
I wonder what percentage of people convert the knowledge and skills acquired during their formal education for productive use. It seems that extending grade school will serve the same purpose as raising the poverty level (e.g. Obamacare). They need to compensate for Obama's liberal fiscal policies through redistribution at the national level. Perhaps Obama's Dream serves a similar purpose to compensate for mass abortion or "planning" of Americans.
Ron F:
"This is what's known as "acting white" - and it's generally viewed as a model of what not to do."
You have it backwards, the intention of the program is not to get them to act white, it is to get the others to act black
The Atlantic author seems to have gotten everything backwards. He's like the people who think that putting slum dwellers in nice apartments and paying for their cable and cell service is going to make them into dues-paying members of the bourgeoisie, with work, cleanliness and savings habits to match.
In any event, community college is very cheap, and no one is prevented from going by the cost. You can wait tables to pay the tuition, no problem. The only certain result of pouring gazillions of federal dollars into community colleges will be to drive up their costs as they add administrators and inflate salaries just like their big brothers and sisters have been doing for the past 49 years.
Despite what most of the so-called educated classes think the major cost of a college education is not tuition-it is the cost of life.(I would say living but that is a term of art.)Rent,food transportation,entertainment,health care and other costs dwarf tuition.The biggest reason I went to what was then called Junior college was that cost of life.There were few programs that addressed this fundamental problem.The only effective one I found was known as the GI bill.And I had to earn that.
Get your English\Linguistics degree in order folks, someone has to teach all these illegals English.
Oh, the entirety of this proposal has yet to be divulged. FREE child care services for those baby mamas wishing to attend free CC. If you oppose this...WAR ON WOMEN!!!
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