Plan to Offer ‘Free’ College in New Mexico Met With Opposition
“moonshot for higher education”
Critics say the price tag supporters are low-balling the real cost which will be much higher.
The College Fix reports:
Free college tuition plan in New Mexico meets with opposition
A new plan to provide free college to all New Mexico residents is under fire by a taxpayer watchdog group and others who claim the state’s governor is underestimating the amount such a program will cost.
According to Paul Gessing, president of the Albuquerque-based Rio Grande Foundation, the $35 million annual price tag Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has put on her plan could be up to $65 million short of the program’s actual cost.
Gov. Lujan Grisham, a Democrat elected in November 2018, recently announced a plan to provide free tuition to all New Mexico residents, wading into a nationwide issue that has become a central topic of debate among 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. Currently, 17 states have some sort of plan to provide free tuition to select students at two or four-year schools.
When announcing the plan, Lujan Grisham called it “moonshot for higher education.”
Yet Lujan Grisham’s “New Mexico Opportunity” plan is notable in that it provides free tuition to all residents, regardless of income level; in doing so, the plan would use taxpayer resources to pay for the children of the state’s wealthiest residents to attend their choice of New Mexico’s 29 public colleges. Currently, New York is the only other state to offer such a plan.
Lujan Grisham has budgeted between $25 million and $35 million for the plan, numbers about which her office says they are “very confident.”
Yet Gessing told The College Fix that the plan “could cost a lot more right away and that if nothing is done to constrain costs at the institutional level that price tag could rise quickly.”
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Comments
It would be easy to offer free college to everyone, but it would destroy the education-industrial complex.
Most of the lectures can be placed on YouTube (many are already there!), so to get credits, something like the Advanced Placement or CLEP tests (proctored) could be given so you would merely need to prove you learned the material. Even skills like coding – I’ve been through a few test web sites used to weed out those who don’t really understand how to implement a simple algorithm.
Pass a law that requires the accreditation to recognize these credits, and ultimately the degrees after sufficient credits earned, and you could do a Bachelor’s degree for a few thousand dollars at most.
But then they wouldn’t have to buy the new 18th edition of the $250 textbook, so the prof wouldn’t get the kickback. You wouldn’t have a 50 (I can’t say “man” and I don’t know the proper term) diversity enforcement and studies group.
There is a company called “Praxis” that can provide income and a career path in 3 months.
I attended college for a short time, but went into computers and electronics. I had no problem learning from books and made a very good income. That was before the internet. Today, it isn’t quite like the scene in the Matrix where Trinity learns to fly a Helicopter, but it is close.
The greater error is the Credentialism over skill. You can get a JD and be bad at lawyering. Most college coders are useless for the first 2 years (about equal to H1-Bs). The 16 year old hacker that dropped out of school and plays in his basement is usually the expert.
Like the Scarecrow in Wizard of Oz, he ended up with a degree but still lacked a brain. At least he didn’t have 6 figure debt (Baum must be laughing from the afterlife if any of the bimetallism view is true).