It looks like the Biden administration has been forced to dump its plans for “free” community college as Democrats struggle to shrink their gargantuan $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” bill down to a slightly less gargantuan size. The White House proposal, employing the strategy used by the Obamacare-fueled Medicaid expansion, called for using short-term subsidies to bribe states to make community college tuition-free, and then entangling them in a web of federal commitments. It’s a bad policy that’s kinda, sorta dead . . . for now.
Yet, as Inside Higher Ed reported this week in a story headlined, “It’s Not Over Till It’s Over,” advocates for free college “aren’t giving up yet—or anytime soon.” Biden promised in a CNN town hall last week that he’d keep pushing free college. Thirty-two education and civil rights organizations issued a joint statement insisting that they’ll keep at it. And, as one Democratic advocate put it, “I have never seen a major legislative initiative not declared dead at least once before rising from the ashes and being enacted. It’s not over until it’s over, and even then, it’s not over.”
The likelihood that “free” college will rise again makes it worth taking a moment to appreciate the larger implications of this push, in the hope that higher education leaders will reconsider their enthusiasm for a cause they’re likely to regret.
Read Full Article »