Our current president has brought forward a proposal that two years of community college be made free to everyone in the nation.
His speech stipulated that the students would have to be enrolled at least at 1/2 time level and that they would have to maintain a 2.5 grade point average.
If we skip over the fact that our constitution does not allow our feral government to be in the education business a troubling possibility comes to mind.
If the student maintains a 2.5 grade point average the tuition would be free. The community college wants the tuition money. Would grading become easier?
Of course it would. That is unless the feds would take control over grading.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
You also forgot ‘they get a free lunch’….
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After WWII, the GI Bill enabled millions of returning veterans to get a college education and no one complained. Really, it propelled the post war recovery with an educated labor force. Compared to throwing money at the middle east and trying to pacify the barbarians there, would it really be so bad?
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Yep! Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex, which influences a lot of our unnecessary defense spending.
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I don’t believe that the GI Bill created the military-industrial complex…interesting that Germany is moving to make all post-secondary education free. Perhaps we can learn from them how to do it without cheating on grades.
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I wasn’t connecting the military industrial complex to the GI Bill. I was commenting on Jerry’s observation about throwing money at the Middle East.
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Sorry about that, you are right!
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It would not be so bad if the quality of the education were anything better than the equivalent of a high school education from 25-30 years ago.
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So the Department of Education is an unconstitutional body?
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There is no mention of education in the enumerated powers.
Brutus
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Section Eight of Article One allows the Congress to provide for the general Welfare of the United States…
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I do not believe “general welfare” includes a free college education by any stretch. And yes, many people believe the Department of Education is unconstitutional.
A EPCC professor told me how the community college tuition/federal student loan system feed off of each other. The federal government raises the threshold of money available for individual student loans, community colleges increase their tuition to match that threshold, the government increases thresholds, tuitions go up again … and so on. Tuition inflation is a vicious cycle.
Is there any reason to believe the community college administrations would not want more 2.5 GPAs if that would increase their funding? Administrators could rationalize that in many ways and still consider themselves “ethical.”
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More concerning to me than the federal funding of education is the fact that we have dishonest people in education who lack integrity and think nothing of manipulating the system to rip off the government and in doing so, also do a disservice to any organization that hires an unprepared graduate. It is also a disservice to the students.
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I think your idea is flawed because you are suggesting that community colleges are in it for the money. That is not only the exact opposite of the entire community college idea, but anathema to any real “community” college. I, for one, am a proud product of El Paso Community College, and when I attended that institution, believe me, the last thing on their collective, ‘community’ mind was making money.
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That was then, this is now. Public education at all levels pays well for the empire-building administrators. Just look at EPISD and its upper management.
School administrators want to keep building and growing and increasing enrollment as a way to justify their salaries and bonuses. They love state and federal subsidies, direct or indirect.
The EPCC president now makes $272,000 annually. So, let’s not act like it’s not big business.
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What is the world coming to. We should just build sports stadiums and watch gladiator fights. Conservatives vs Liberals, Repos vs Demos.
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We’ve already built a baseball stadium. We built it to satisfy two conservatives, who would probably be happy to stage gladiator fights if it puts money in their pockets.
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Or, have the fights at the EPCC. They have an athletics program that asks for more funding each year. Make it a fundraiser for the free tuition.
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