Posted on 12/22/2019 6:44:30 AM PST by karpov
Free community college is a big hit on the campaign trail as candidates battle over student debt plans but there’s a downside — schools could be overwhelmed by a tide of new students who’d still wind up without degrees.
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates back free tuition for two-year colleges but they’ve skipped over how it would really work. If too many students show up, the system will buckle, even if more cash accompanies them, and students run the risk of being shut out of packed classes, college leaders say. No one has yet figured out how to efficiently transfer community college class credits to four-year universities. And there’s no reliable way to assess how good the programs are in helping students get jobs or move toward four-year degrees.
“If you make college free and then enroll all these new students, it would just make the problem even worse,” said John Mullane, president of College Transfer Solutions, an advocacy group working to enable students to fully transfer their credits from a two-year college to a four-year university.
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“If the schools are having a problem right now serving the students that they have, and if you’re giving them more students, how is that going to help them to retain and graduate the current students that they have?” he asked.
The questions about free college emerge as POLITICO and PBS NewsHour prepare to host the last Democratic debate of the year on Thursday at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Seven candidates — Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang — have qualified for the debate.
Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren support making public colleges and universities free for some, if not all, students, as do candidates who did not qualify
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
I might consider subsidizing trade school tuition for certain trades such as welders, electricians, CNC machinists, and fabricators. Those are high demand, high skill trades where we need better candidates, but any subsidization of “higher education” is a joke.
Unless they tack on a ton of regulations dictating courses of study, we would be subsidizing drunken idiots studying climate change and global women’s studies.
But they want the four year, private college experience!
Do these kids think they will even get the “community college” experience? They will get free classes online with testing at a remote testing site.
And it will be worth exactly what they pay for it.
A basic fundamental economic principle: you get what you pay for. Free college?
Yeah Right.
Some view community colleges as remedial high school. Just another extension of the education industry. Someone here said we should beef up trade schools. I concur 100%.
Unions used to have apprentices. That went away with the right to work states. While on balance the RTW laws are a good thing, killing the apprentice programs, even with their nepotism reliance, was not.
Had to have a plumber come by to fix a faucet/pipe problem was having. I am not spry enough to get to where the connections need be made. When we finished, as I helped him with it, he said you should be working with me as you know what you are doing and know the difference between using wrench or pliers. He added he cannot find anyone who fits that bill plus will show up. He knocked a good deal off his bill for my “assistance”.
If there was stringent grade and test requirements, if there was no box to be checked for race or sex, if there was a finite number of openings for only very needed professions, I’d be fine with it on a two year college. If the minute your grades collapsed you were toss out, then great.
1) Take the money out of 4 year universities. 2) Put the Community colleges on the trimester system where they can enroll right out of high school. No summer breaks. Give them a certificate in 12-18 months. Problem solved.
Free community college = government babysitting and indoctrination centers.
Students who pay for college from their own earnings will take it more seriously.
BINGO
It's okay, so long as all college professors teach for free, and all college administrators and staff work for free. Oh, and some utility company has to provide the free electricity. And the book publishers have to provide free books.
We can make this work.
I don’t know about other states but community college was basically free in California until maybe 20 years ago. It was something like $5 a unit until then.
The appropriate number of college students is about 10% of the current number.
We have a long, long way to go.
If the minute your grades collapsed you were toss out, then great.
Yup. Attended a private college back in stone age when it was affordable assuming you had a part time job or VA benefits. Required to take minimum of 12 credit hours on the semester system BUT you must graduate in 4 years. Receive less than 2.0 GPA in any semester or fail one course, onto probation you went. Second violation was good bye. This was in the era of earning your letter grade, not pass fail, not everyone gets a trophy.
What you would be adding is more students that are not prepared for college just as the four year schools have.
Students that do not have reading or math skills necessary to succeed in the basic classes.
Until K through 12 is successful in providing teenagers with the Three R’s sending more high school graduates to community college is pointless.
And actually that would make a college degree meaningful again. Now it means nothing.
If it’s made “free” the price will double in 3 years.
These idiots want the government to pay whatever the colleges charge. Insanity.
If implemented, huge numbers of unqualified students will enroll and then drop out, wasting a huge amount of money.
Anyone who proposes this is unfit for public office.
That is a very small percentage of current students—and you are absolutely correct.
Kids should be steered to free online remedial apps until they are prepared to do college-level work anyway, which for many of them, of course, will be never.
What we have now is a mass of colleges giving passing grades and degrees to students working at the junior high level, at best—because Uncle Sam is eager to send them checks for doing so.
The system is totally corrupted beloww the top couple of tiers of schools, where it is currently only halfway corrupted in terms of standards (but generally corrupted in terms of propaganda and ideology).
We really need to start all over. I’d like to see a “home college” accreditation system.
I was a prof at a for-profit university.
Students had a financial reason to succeed.
1/4 of my students simply wouldn’t do the work.
Somehow, apparently to the complete amazement of the author, thousands of students transfer their community college credits to four-year programs. Thousands of servicemen each year also gain transfer credits through CLEP testing. You can vastly increase the efficiency of the process through standardization, but you'll also vastly decrease the opportunities for graft along the way.
Nearly all Gen Ed 100-200 level college courses can be standardized and taught via online coursework with a high degree of faculty interaction and quality for an absolute pittance. All useful textbook materials for these courses are available in the open source community and there is no legitimate reason why any college kid would have to pay for more than printing costs for their textbooks.
Many major programs of study could extend those efficiencies at least into 300-level coursework. Legitimate programs from accredited universities like MIT and Stanford already do this, and services like Coursera deliver college-quality coursework for a very low fee.
If the goal of higher education was actually conveying knowledge, all of those barriers to learning that exist in colleges across America would already be removed. But the goal isn't learning, it's protecting an accreditation racket, and the smaller rackets of growing University endowments, textbook shakedowns, self justifying academic programs, and a jobs program for academic administrators.
Funny.
First step, seriously, is trim about half of all “administration” and “executives” at community colleges and universities. Been teaching at a community college for over 5-yrs now, adjunct, and pay raises not seen since I started teaching there, BUT, the number of administrators has sky-rocketed and their pay has too.
Had a couple of administrators decided to “rate” each other and then both gave the other a hefty pay raise. Then these guys gave each other a new title (chancellor) and of course, more pay goes along with that.
Oh, and this college no longer hires full-time instructors. Adjunct cost less and you don’t have to provide benefits. Occasionally they will “hire” someone for full-time but only if they decide to place that person into a chair position or higher.
Where are the Trustees? Absent.
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