Obama’s community college plan: The wrong way to improve job skills Skills to pay the bills Tuesday night, President Obama touted his “bold new plan to lower the cost of community college to zero,” an idea that’s now at the center of the administration’s “middle-class economics” agenda. “This plan,” Obama promised, “is your chance to graduate ready for the new economy.” The President is right that American workers need more opportunities to get the training they need to move up the economic ladder. He’s wrong that free community college is one of the best ways for the feds to get us there. The truth is, most low-income students already attend community college tuition-free. Yet more than 60% of students who start at these institutions fail to get a credential within six years. And while fewer students take out student loans at community colleges, more than 20% of those who do borrow default within three years of leaving school. By doubling down on this troubled model, the President’s plan would spend more without solving the structural problems that plague it. But wait, proponents are likely saying, the proposal requires that community colleges “adopt promising and evidence-based institutional reforms to improve student outcomes.” The White House fact sheet on the plan promises that by “restructuring the community college experience” and spending more money, the program will increase student success. This strikes us as wishful thinking for two reasons. First, it’s exceptionally difficult to reform institutions that were created in a different era to answer a different set of demands. Take the Achieving the Dream project, an ambitious effort started in 2004 that is trying to apply evidence-based reforms to more than 200 community colleges in 35 states. In 2011, a study of the initial cohort of 26 community colleges found that, with a few exceptions, student outcomes remained largely unchanged. Second, the federal government’s track record of improving schools via new money and new rules is not encouraging. In K-12, federal efforts — from No Child Left Behind to the Obama administration’s School Improvement Grants — have disappointed. Why would we have it any easier when it comes to community colleges? To be sure, there are smart new ways to help community college students succeed. At the City University of New York, researchers have found that a combination of tuition waivers, free MetroCards and textbooks and better advising — along with a requirement that students enroll full-time — boosted graduation rates among remedial students. But it is not a shortage of ideas that hamstrings federal reformers; it’s the difficulty of ensuring those ideas are implemented well. If not free community college, then what? Americans need a wider set of high-quality training options — including ones that fit with the realities of working full time, raising kids and keeping up with a rapidly changing labor market. Advances in technology have moved us toward a world where training and credentialing can be less expensive to deliver, more flexible and more closely connected to employer demands. From Udacity’s low-cost “nanodegrees” — sequences of online courses developed in partnership with industry — to the targeted instruction at firms like General Assembly, private-sector entrepreneurs are actively building products that allow workers to retrain and retool without dropping everything to go to school. Though these offerings look nothing like a two-year or four-year degree, they are helping students. But current financial aid policies limit innovators’ ability to compete on a level playing field with traditional colleges. Unfortunately, the President’s proposal would heap subsidies on public institutions that too often fail to meet the needs of their students while crowding out promising alternatives. That’s the real cost of free community college. Kelly is director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute. James is a research fellow at the institute. Related Stories TRANSCRIPT: President Obama’s State of the Union address Editorial: Obama thinks too small Warren: Obama takes surging economy victory lap at SOTU Source: nydailynews/ newsnyork/obamas-community-college-plan-the-wrong-way-to-improve-job-skills/
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 04:15:31 +0000
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