Obama Proposes 2 Years of Free Community College

An anonymous reader writes with news about a White House proposal that would provide 2 years of free community college for good students."President Barack Obama announced a proposal Thursday to provide two years of free community college tuition to American students who maintain good grades. 'Put simply, what I'd like to do is to see the first two years of community college free for everyone who's willing to work for it,' Obama said in a video filmed Wednesday aboard Air Force One and posted to Facebook. He made the announcement as part of his pre-State of the Union tour and will formally lay out the proposal Friday in a speech in Tennessee. The White House estimated it would save the average community college student $3,800 annually and said it could benefit nine million if fully realized."

Comments

Re:Free?

[damn_registrars]

My first is in college right now, and we are paying just about $600/semester (Plus books) for full time at the local community college. She can go there two years then head to the 4 year state school where the costs is something like $5k/semester plus books.

Community colleges are great, but a lot of people fall into traps that sound like what you are describing. In >>99% of all cases, a 2-year degree from a community college does not knock off anywhere near 2 years from a 4-year bachelor's degree. Generally that 2-year degree knocks off one year and maybe a couple miscellaneous lib-ed requirements. Yeah, it saves you some money but it costs you some time. You could have gone straight into a 4-year program and - assuming you knew what you wanted to major in (which a lot of kids do not) - graduated in 4 years. Instead you started off at community and now your 4-year degree is taking you a total of 5+ years.

Now, those 5 years might actually be a really good investment. For a lot of kids it certainly is - a lot of kids finish high school without any real ability to adapt to college. Nonetheless it does not lead to the dramatic money savings that many people (or more so, many people's parents) hope for.

It never ceases to amaze me when people get 70K into debt going to a 4 year school getting a secondary education degree or something, where the starting annual pay is half their debt load.

This varies a lot from one state to another but a lot of states now require a master's to teach at primary or secondary level. $70K is actually doing quite well for student loans for a bachelors and a masters. Most physicians - who have generally done only 8 years of school (2 years more than a teacher) - are well into six figures of debt by the time they start a residency.

As for the relation between debt load and salary, I would say that your observation says more about how little we pay our teachers than anything.