Joe Biden Now Promoting the Idea of ‘Free’ Community College
“for students enrolled in high-quality programs that lead to a four-year degree or a good paying job”
Democrats seem determined to deliver some sort of free college no matter what.
The College Fix reports:
Biden proposes free community college nationwide in $90B higher ed budget proposal
President Joe Biden proposed taking steps toward expanding tuition-free community college in his $90 billion higher education budget outline he introduced yesterday for fiscal year 2024 that begins Oct. 1.
“The Budget…invests mandatory funding to expand free community college across the nation,” according to the budget document.
“To lay the groundwork for this program, the Budget includes $500 million in a new discretionary grant program to provide two years of free community college for students enrolled in high-quality programs that lead to a four-year degree or a good paying job.”
It also earmarks “a tuition subsidy of up to $4,500 per year for two years for students from families earning less than $125,000 who enroll in four-year historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and universities, or other minority-serving institutions,” Forbes reported.
The budget also includes a plan to double the maximum federal Pell Grant by 2029, increasing the maximum award to $8,215 from the current max of $7,395.
It would also allocate $2.7 billion to the Office of Federal Student Aid, an increase of $620 million from fiscal year 2023.
Additionally, it would allocate more funding to TRIO, a federal program developed to “identify and provide services for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds,” including low-income people, first-generation college students, and people with disabilities.
The stated goal is to help advance them from middle school through post-secondary education. TRIO would get about $107 million more than last year.
Biden’s budget proposal would also increase funding by approximately $20 million to GEAR UP, another federal program, which offers grants to service high-poverty middle and high schools.
The president and Democratic members of Congress had proposed free community college in a 2021 social spending package, but the proposal did not make it into Biden’s budget proposal last year, Higher Ed Dive reported.
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Comments
This is just the adult version of the kid running for school president, promising soft drinks flowing from the drinking fountains.
if you want a college education, pay for it yourself. i did. my wife did. all my kids did. no tax payer dollars were spent on a combined 28 years of higher education.
that $90 million could be better spent on, i don’t know, maybe, reducing the debt, or something stupid like that.
If you and your family members went to state institutions, tax dollars helped fund your education. My CC gets about 1/2 of its funding from the state.
Having said that, yes, students should pay the rest of the tuition and fees. No skin in the game leads to bad outcomes.
Something more than half of what goes on at those places is BS.
I’d say any subsidy went the other way.
Whether taxpayers want to fund this fundamentally anti-ed nonsense is a separate question.
Dual Enrollment. If done right, your kid gets to complete most of an AA degree while still in high school and the County Dept. of Ed. pays for it.
“Poor” students already have Pell grants funded by the feds and get tuition and fees covered as well as a stipend for living expenses. This is an unnecessary plan.
“…enrolled in high-quality programs that lead to a four-year degree or a good paying job.”
It’s not about funds for poor kids, it’s about directing funds to degrees, studies, and institutions The Apparatus wants to patronize.
The students are just chips in this game; keep “costs” out of reach, and the poor ones have to play along to have any chance at all.
So state colleges and university will become just as ineffective as public schools?
“Democrats seem determined to deliver some sort of free college no matter what.”
I suspect they just can’t stand the thought of the existence of an alternative track that isn’t yet Marxist propaganda mill.
They also can’t stand the thought of people choosing for themselves how to build better lives, let alone what “better” is,
Today’s community colleges are teaching much of what was once taught in middle schools.
There is nothing as expensive as “free”. Community college budgets will be as outrageously bloated as mainline university budgets are if this passes. 100% of this “subsidy” will be captured by schools in tuition and fee increases, as Pell Grants and student loans were.