the bait and switch way this is written literally made me laugh out loud
biden: my new plan guarantees four additional years of free education
kids in high school: holy shit free college?!
biden: oh no two years of pre-school and then two years of college*
*only at select locations, restrictions apply
Okay but pre-school is expensive as hell. Making it free will directly improve the lives of so many families.
so is community college it will literally cut the cost of college in half or make it free for the people that choose one of the many careers you can get with a two year degree are y'all stupid or just dumb
do ppl actually not realise how important affordable childcare is to working women???
Hi, I'm a mum! Pre-pandemic, I was working over forty hours a week, and the entirety of my paycheck went to covering my kid's daycare cost. Daycare and pre school are expensive, so much so that a lot of people quite literally can't afford it, even when working full time.
Having two years of pre-k education covered is absolutely beyond helpful. Parents genuinely want to provide the very best for the kids and having early education covered can go a long way in allowing parents to do just that.
Look, I don’t have kids and I am still buried under student loans from college. I absolutely believe free college is necessary.
However.
There is decades worth of evidence that pre-K education is one of the strongest ways of giving kids enduring advantages in K-12 education. A lot of the data comes specifically out of Oklahoma, which does have voluntary universal pre-K (which makes it an excellent case study) and the research shows gains across all racial and socio-economic boundaries. That paper is from 2005. Researchers revisited the kids later to see how persistent these gains were, or if they were drowned out by all the other stuff.
Turns out, the kids who were in pre-K continued to have academic success through middle school (they hadn’t tracked through high school). And just for fun, they also did some projected adult earnings for kids who went through pre-K, as fun benefit-cost analysis of the whole thing. And it looks like the benefits skew disproportionately in favor of the more disadvantaged students.
Community college is great and should be accessible to everybody. But universal pre-K will catch more kids early on to ensure they have a better shot at finishing high school. The evidence screams that it is one of the single most-effective measures in leveling the playing field for all kids, and reducing the generations of privilege baked into the system.
And Biden’s campaign stance was always two years of free community college, NOT four years at any and all universities.
It’s not a bait and switch if it’s the two years of college he previously “promised” us PLUS something new and different that is explained IN THE NEXT / SAME SENTENCE so people wouldn’t get confused and think it meant four years of college.
I don’t usually comment on these types of posts but I just, I love and value community college so I can’t not speak:
2 years of free community college will do more for more people than 4 years of “””real””’ college. full stop.
community colleges take everyone who applies. you don’t need a good gpa, its ok if you fumbled a bit in high school, or have a GED. community colleges encourage graduation but they don’t care about admissions metrics and graduation percentages the way universities do. community colleges are also much easier for older people to get into, because, again, they’re not trying to only admit the youngest and most brilliant. it’s community college.
most community colleges also have robust vocational programs. the one I went to had HVAC, electrician, welding, auto mechanic, plumbing, fire fighting, nursing (both RN and LVN), radiology tech, respiratory tech, foodservice training, various accounting and information management certifications AS WELL AS providing associate degrees for transfer, which in the california college system, at least, certifies that you’ve finished your GE work and undergraduate courses in your major and are eligible for transfer to a 4 year school where you are guaranteed to enter as a junior, for BOTH the UC system and the CSU system. which means instead of paying 330$ or more a unit, you got all that work done for about 40$ a unit.
on top of which going to community college in the first place acts as a re-set on your gpa! got solid D’s in high school? have a GED? tanked whatever SAT-ACT college admission exam is popular currently? no one cares! once you have a college transcript that’s all anyone will ever want to know about! i’m speaking from personal experience, btw, it drives me utterly insane i wasted so much time studying for the SAT and paying to take it, just to have it be a completely worthless number that no one ever asks me about bc you don’t need it for admissions to community college and universities only care about your community college grades.
ALSO community college doesn’t just provide education for young people! a lot of older people are advised to take classes at a community college to stay engaged socially and occupy themselves! if this ‘2 years’ of free community college is determined by ‘2 years’ worth of units rather than 2 years worth of time, then lots of elderly people who wouldn’t be able to afford activities and enrichment would be able to take advantage. (or even just get some job training to be better able to support themselves, bc *shocker* not all old people are rich boomers)
i’m actually very angry that this is an argument we have to have because in terms of connecting the ‘most vulnerable/needy’ to the greatest resources, free community college is so obviously the best option. ‘free 4 year university’ does not mean ‘all admission requirements are gone now’, the barriers to entry that stop people from going to university are not just about money, but rather the intersection of having done well enough to surmount the admissions requirements and the ability to acquire scholarships, grants, and loans. ‘free university’ would only solve half the problem, and leave all the people who stumbled, struggled, or quit in high school out of luck, especially the people interested in trades which aren’t traditionally offered at 4 year schools.
TL;DR: pre-k is good! community college is good!
