Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have plans to provide two years of free college tuition. President Obama has proposed a similar plan. The rationale behind these plans is two-fold: college costs too much, and a college education ought to be more broadly available to the public. By making two years of college free, the thinking goes, the cost of education to students will be reduced and access to higher education increased.
Those plans have received criticism from Republicans because of their tax implications and because they represent an expansion of the federal government. There has been no opposition to them, though, from either AACU or CIC , the entities that represent independent higher education. This is surprising, of course, since the proposals represent a significant threat to the schools they represent.
If independent colleges were to oppose these plans, though, they needn't do it simply out of self-interest. Instead, there are educational and civic reasons to do so. Here they are:
Educational: While there are many outstanding community colleges, few of them are successful at graduating students with associates degrees in two years. There are many explanations--community college students have complex lives, they don't always come from strong high schools, they aren't always seeking a two-year degree, they are poorly funded, etc.
Of equal importance, though, is that community colleges aren't set up to provide maximum support to their students. The majority of faculty are part-time, classes are large, student support is stretched to its limit, and high-impact learning practices aren't widely available. Many community colleges are stretched beyond their resources with their current enrollments. In short, the institutional factors that lead to student success aren't as available as they need to be in community colleges.
The plan to encourage enrollment in community colleges, then, amounts to an effort to stress those institutions to a greater extent without responding to their challenges. ( The K-12 equivalent of it would be to encourage more students to enroll in struggling public schools, something that policymakers have widely moved away from in the past decade.) There is little reason to believe that shifting enrollment to two-year schools will improve education there.
Civic: There are two points to consider here. First, the concern about student loan debt represents a profound failure of civic imagination. In the United States, there are four major types of debt: mortgage debt, student loan debt, auto loan debt, and credit card debt. The total amount of student loan debt (1.1 trillion) is now slightly higher than auto debt (900 billion) and credit card debt (900 billion), and about 1/8th of mortgage debt. Yet there is no national policy debate about reducing the cost of cars; no major party urges the eradication of credit card debt; no one worries that mortgages are tying the hands of the public. Yet all three of these types of borrowing have lower returns on investment than the college education that student loans buy. And neither cars, nor credit cards, nor even homeownership are as important to the flourishing of communities as the presence of civically engaged college graduates. Put another way--the best thing for people and communities to borrow for is education.
Second, if free community college were to shift student enrollment significantly from four-year schools to two-year and from independent to public, the impact on communities would be strongly negative. Small, independent colleges are are the heart of thousands of communities around the United States. And they form a hugely significant part of the independent, non-profit sector. In that role they inspire service, provide civic leadership, build social networks, respond to suffering, raise critiques, and create innovation.
Independent colleges outpace their public peers in educating low-income and first generation students, and in providing engaging education. To undermine them, then, is to undermine institutions that serve the students Sanders and Clinton most worry about. And it is to undermine communities across the United States that rely on an effective civic sector to flourish.
