Obama’s Community College Plan: WHO Gets to Pay for It?

On Friday, January 9, President Obama introduced a new plan to open community colleges to all by offering free tuition.

The President’s proposal–which is unlikely to receive support from the Republican-led Congress–would pay the entire cost of tuition for two years at a community college for any American who wanted it.  State and local governments would have to join the effort, with 75% of the cost (roughly $3,800 per year, per student) being borne by the federal government, and the remaining 25% paid by states.

The plan, if implemented, would primarily help middle-class students.  Lower-income Americans who attend school at least half time and maintain a 2.5 grade point average can already qualify for Pell grants, which usually cover the full cost of community college.

My question:  How are we going to pay for this?  Estimates are that the proposal would cost $8 billion per year or, according to one report I heard, $32 billion.  Should this tax burden be foisted onto the backs of taxpayers who are already burdened, struggling to repay their own college debts?

San Diego University student Jennifer Kabbany, writing on the student website College Fix, explained why Obama’s free community college plan is a horrible idea.  She writes:

“Once again Obama – a.k.a. America’s Sugar Daddy – has shown that he wants to win the youth vote by appealing to its greedy, lazy, self-entitled side – and at the same time making them more dependent on the federal government. Because that’s how Democrats win votes.”

Kabbany complains that the plan would strap American workers with tens of billions of dollars of new debt every year.

“This at a time when the national debt stands at nearly $20 trillion dollars – and that’s not including the estimated $70 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments from Medicare, Social Security, student loan guarantees and other future federal government promises that actually makes our debt stand at more like $90 trillion dollars, some economists have calculated.

The last thing this country needs is another massive entitlement.”

May I suggest that young people interested in attaining a college degree do what students did during my college years?  Get a job.  Deliver pizzas in the evening, work in a factory during the summer months, and pay for it.  Study hard, competing for available scholarship funds. Or do what I did:  Go to work for an employer which offers educational benefits.  

The average annual tuition for a community college is only $3,800–within the reach of most Americans, if they will plan carefully and forego other expenses.  Loans are easily available.  So are scholarships, if you work hard in high school.  Why should we absorb yet another costly tax to fix a system which was not broken?  And who gets to pay for this?  The young people Obama claims to help, who will be saddled with higher national debt throughout their lives.

Already, Obamacare with its promise of free and low-cost health care is proving to be cost prohibitive (and not the panacea we had been promised).  Democrats are clamoring for free birth control and free cell phones, neither of which is a constitutional right as far as I know.

I’m thinking that many of those who would take advantage of this “free” education, and whose votes the Dems would like to buy, would actually prefer the tried-and-true offer of free cell phones. Then, we could use the leftover $29.7 billion to pay down the national debt.