In a recent speech in Tennessee, President Barack Obama outlined his plan for two years of tuition-free higher education. In a subsequent Facebook video, he said that his purpose was to make “… the first two years of community college free for everybody who is willing to work for it.”
It might be, or could be, a good program, but it has been buried underneath mounds of unanswered questions, misstatements, corrections and flying numbers (they’re like flying monkeys, only worse). It almost seems to be the product of being carried away by the idea of nationalizing — that is, catching up with — state initiatives already addressing the formidable costs of higher education.
The cost of the program is just one example of a fuzzy, moving target. The White House’s cost estimate apparently assumes that there will be no change in enrollment when the cost drops to zero from $3,347, the latest average annual amount according to the College Board. Since one of the goals is to increase enrollment, this doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.
Estimating the impact of the program won’t be easy, although it is already being compared with the G.I. Bill. Large government programs like the president’s community college plan can cause changes that are difficult to anticipate. Surprisingly, sometimes these changes can be good things.
In 1944, most political supporters of the successful G.I. Bill, for example, were not overly concerned with the inherent value of higher education to the citizenry. The program, which included living expenses as well as tuition, was largely the product of worry about the millions of G.I.s returning from overseas and flooding the job market at a time when policy advisers were already predicting a post-war recession.
There was a genuine fear that the end of the wartime production boom would find us slipping back into the abyss of the Great Depression. All too recent memories of 1930s hobo camps and soup kitchens danced in legislators’ heads. That’s why the G.I. Bill included a full year’s worth of unemployment benefits for veterans.
Instead of a recession or a depression we found ourselves in a post-war boom, and with a few hiccups and minor recessions, the economic good times lasted for decades, long enough to have generations of Americans affected by its changes.
One of the biggest changes was in our attitude toward higher education and the professors, and those who studied there. Prior to the G.I. Bill and the post-war economic expansion, that attitude was far from positive. Spoiled “college boys” were viewed as useless nuisances, and professors as fog-bound fuddies who lacked an ounce of common sense.
As late as the presidential campaigns of 1952 and 1956, efforts were made to discredit the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson by calling him an “egghead,” which was the common pejorative for those who enjoyed reading books.
The G.I. Bill, along with the new veneration of technology, gradually changed all that. Still, the reasons why some 2.6 million ex-G.I.s signed up for four-year colleges might have had as much to do with moving upward, out of the working class as it did with educational content — something we should remember as we develop more post high school subsidy programs.
In addition to serving students with diverse goals, community colleges tend to be open enrollment in general, with only some programs being more selective and having specific requirements. This is the unsurprising reason for the very low degree completion rate in community colleges.
One barrier to the success of the president’s idea is that the goals are still so muddy. It isn’t clear, for example, whether the program is aimed at expanding higher education or shifting the financial burden from students to federal taxpayers. It isn’t even clear whether the program is aimed at patching the inadequacies of today’s average high schools or increasing access to higher education.
According to the experts, unless we increase our output of two-year and four-year degrees we will not be able to meet the demand for these degreed workers. This could leave us in the horrible position of facing three choices: curtailing output, offshoring, or importing skilled workers while our own men and women stand idle.
Simply awarding degrees, though, without solving the underlying educational problems in so many of our schools, higher and lower, though, won’t fix the problem. It worked for the Scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz,” but that wasn’t Kansas or any other real place.
We have a real education problem that goes beyond shifting tuition costs. The president’s plan could be helpful, maybe even game-changing, but it needs a lot of work before it’s ready for the real world.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes a column for the monthly Herald Business Journal.
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