Obama’s Free College Plan Lacks Common Sense
The president presented a variety of subjects throughout the speech. Photo courtesy of Getty Images and Mark Wilson.
January 29, 2015
President Barack Obama recently proposed making community college tuition-free for responsible students. Obama’s goal, said Cecilia Muñoz, the White House’s domestic policy director, is “to make two years of college the norm — the way high school is the norm.” Within this policy, there are requirements that a student must meet, including having a GPA of at least 2.5 and maintaining continual progress throughout the year.
Now there are definitely some positives and negatives to this policy. With this policy, more people will most likely go to college, furthering their education. Additionally, students will have more opportunities at higher paying jobs than they would if they went into the workforce right after high school. People who may not be able to pay for college might soon have the opportunity to go as well.
However, there are still naysayers, including myself. First, the requirements are not difficult to accomplish. Maintaining a 2.5 GPA is not a difficult thing to accomplish, and accomplishing that doesn’t mean you are responsible and are willing to work. If this policy was going to have any chance of working, the GPA requirement would need to be raised to at least a 3.0.
Second, other students who simply can’t pay for school are going to be forced to work with those who just aren’t willing to work as hard. Having this combination of students in the same classroom will just cause chaos for students and the professor. When one person is willing to work hard to get a project done and they are paired with someone who isn’t, the one willing to work is going to get frustrated and angry, causing the whole project to not be up to par. Besides, having too many people with higher degrees will affect the availability of certain jobs, decreasing those willing to work in some blue-collar job markets.
The only way for people to maybe accept this proposal is if Obama has every community college document the quality of work students produce when they maintain the necessary average. The schools could vouch for their students, informing the government that said students are worthy of the free tuition. Now is Obama actually going to do that? Probably not, and if he does, it would just be a waste of time for every community college out there. Obama’s proposal was not thought out thoroughly and should not even be considered being turned into a law.
