"Kludge Not"Obama’s plan for free community college is elegant and forward-thinking—unlike virtually

Kludge Not Obama’s plan for free community college is elegant and forward-thinking—unlike virtually all U.S. policy fixes.

By Jordan Weissmann at Slate

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/01/obama_community_college_plan_free_education_is_an_elegant_and_forward_thinking.single.html

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To understand why that’s so important, we need to talk about why college is so expensive in this country in the first place. It’s a complicated story, but the basic outline is this: For several decades now, colleges have failed to control their costs. At the same time, budget-pressed states have cut per-student funding. Combined, those two forces have pushed public colleges and universities to increase their tuition. (You can argue over whether government defunding or out-of-control spending is more important, but both have played a role.) The federal government, seeing all this, has tried to combat rising prices without demanding too much from states or schools, instead offering loans, grants, and tax breaks directly to students so they can afford an education.

Of course, this has bred other problems. Federal financial aid has made it possible for states to keep cutting their appropriations and for schools to keep hiking tuition without hurting enrollment. Meanwhile, it’s also nourished a predatory for-profit college industry that lures in low-income, underprepared students so it can feed off their federal loan and grant dollars. (Disclosure: Slate is owned by Graham Holdings Co., owner of Kaplan University, a for-profit college company.) Add it all up together, mix in rising enrollment and a faltering economy that’s hammered family incomes, and you get our enormous student-loan problem. We saw the system was malfunctioning. We patched it with one kludge after another. And now we’re staring at the blue screen of death.

Theoretically, we could solve all this by reinvesting in our public colleges so that tuition stays cheap. For a while now, I’ve argued that Washington could actually make state-school tuition free for today’s students if it just redirected the money it spends on financial aid at private schools into the public system. It’s similar to the idea that America would be better off if we laid waste to our weird public-private health care system and switched to single payer. But just like that particular liberal dream, making public colleges tuition-free with the money we already spend is unrealistic because it would be massively disruptive to the status quo, and university lobbyists would scream bloody murder.


But it might not be so crazy to try the experiment on a smaller scale with community colleges, as Obama has proposed. Under his plan, the federal government would pay 75 percent of the cost of tuition for students enrolled at least half time while participating states would pick up the rest. In other words, Washington would give a hand only if state governments promise not to use it as an excuse to shirk their own responsibilities. Implicitly, it also encourages states to make sure community colleges keep their costs down—though, unlike four-year schools, their spending hasn’t grown much in recent years. In the end, it seems designed to break the cycle of increasing costs and rising government aid. And it may be realistic because in the grand scheme of things, it’s dirt cheap.

Yes, dirt cheap. Right now, the White House estimates that its plan would cost the federal government $60 billion over 10 years. The states would be on the hook for another $20 billion. To put that in context, the feds currently spend almost $68 billion annually on financial aid—a large chunk of which is delivered as tax breaks that often go to high-income families. States, meanwhile, award billions more in scholarships to students. Somewhere in those giant pools of money, it should be possible to find $8 billion a year that would be better spent making community colleges tuition-free.


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