President barack Obama says 9 million students could benefit from his plan to make at least two years of community college education free of charge. This proposal featured in his state-of-the-union address on January 20. If all 50 states go along with it, a typical full-time community-college student could save $3,800 a year, he claims. Students must maintain a 2.5 grade-point average (C+) to qualify. Uncle Sam would cover 75 percent of the cost; the states would pick up the rest. The White House says the tab will be $60 billion (Rs.373,379 crore) over ten years. Community colleges are publicly funded local institutions which offer vocational courses or prepare students to transfer to a four-year university programme. President Obama calls them œessential pathways to the middle class and praises their flexible schedules: œThey work for people who work full-time. They work for parents who have to raise kids full-time. They work for folks who have gone as far as their skills will take them and want to earn new ones, but don™t have the capacity to just suddenly go study for four years and not work. Tuition is typically $3,300 per year ” far less than at a university. Quality varies. Some courses are excellent; others are out of date or ill-matched to local job markets. Only 20 percent of full-time students at community colleges earn an associate™s degree within three years ” and it is supposed to take two. The president™s scheme might encourage Americans deterred by the price tag to study. But for many students community college was already free or nearly so. Financial aid averages around $5,000 per student per year. Anyone from a family that makes less than $24,000 (Rs.14.40 lakh) a year also qualifies for a Pell grant of up to $5,730 (Rs.3.43 lakh) a year ” an already generous (by Indian standards) scheme that Obama has expanded. Obama™s new plan is loosely based on the Tennessee Promise, a state programme backed by both Republicans and Democrats. It is also similar to a scheme in Chicago. However, a Republican Congress is unlikely to fund another federal spending spree, even if the cost to taxpayers is only $6 billion (Rs.36,000 crore) a year (4 percent of the federal education budget). Lamar Alexander, a former secretary of education and now a Republican senator representing Tennessee, says he would like to expand the Tennessee Promise, but thinks such programmes should be left largely to the states, not the federal government. New deserving elite phenomenon œMy big fear, says Paul Ryan, an influential Republican congressman from Wisconsin, is that America is losing sight of the notion that œthe condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life. œOpportunity, according to Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, œis slipping away. Before the word meritocracy was coined by Michael Young, a British sociologist and institutional entrepreneur in the 1950s, there was a different name for the notion that power, success and wealth should be distributed according to…
