Sept. 15, 2021
Kevin Carey's analysis of the "free community college" aspect of a recent Biden bill is referenced in Inside Higher Education to explain who exactly will pay for "free community college."
Different states fund community colleges in different ways. Some use local referenda to approve property tax levies, as in Michigan. Some rely on appropriations from both state and local governments, as in New Jersey. Some rely on state but not local governments, as in Massachusetts. Some states have been relatively generous and kept funding high enough to keep tuition very low, like California. Others, like New Hampshire and Vermont, offer such low funding levels that even community colleges have to charge quite a bit.
For the federal government to bring tuition down to zero across every state, it has to figure out how to manage all those different systems. Pure scholarships for existing tuition levels would do it, but they would effectively reward the stingy states while punishing the generous ones. That’s bad politics. So instead, as Kevin Carey reported, they’re taking a sort of national average (counting each state equally, so California doesn’t drag down the average) of tuition levels, and proposing to pay a set percentage of that. The idea is that the states would pay the rest, and students wouldn’t have to pay at all.
Already, that’s optimistic. The history of Medicare expansion shows clearly that many states will push back on matching funds -- even on very generous terms -- on principle, however misplaced. That potentially limits free community college to certain states. And the very real prospect of near-term shifts in political party control suggests that whatever funding level is established initially will erode over time.
Read the full article here.