Last Friday, President Barack Obama announced what he called an “ambitious new plan to bring down the cost of college tuition in America,” during a speech at a community college in Knoxville, Tennessee.
The President, with the support of that state’s two Republican senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, is calling for Congress to pass a proposal that would make two years of community college free for students who maintain a minimum 2.5 grade point average and attend school at least half-time.
The plan, formally called America’s College Promise, could “save a full-time community college student an average of $3,800 in tuition per year and benefit about 9 million students per year, if they earn good grades and stay on track to graduate,” according to a statement by the White House.
Administration officials estimate that the plan, which is modeled on a successful program implemented at the state-level in Tennessee, would cost the federal government about $60 billion over 10 years.
The proposal is consistent with the president’s more comprehensive ambition to reduce the cost of higher education and, by extension, the crisis of student indebtedness.
Obama, who has stated that he wants the U.S. to lead the world in college graduation rates by 2020, has employed the power of executive action to increase Pell Grant award maximums and has put a ceiling on the amount of interest banks can tack onto student loans.
According to data put out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), although the U.S. has the fifth-largest proportion of adults between 25 and 64 with college degrees, only 30 percent of those out of school have attained a higher level of education than their parents. Only Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany, among the countries surveyed by the OECD, fared worse in that metric.
And a lot of that reality has to do with the skyrocketing cost of college.
According to the Project on Student Debt, an initiative of the Institute for College Access & Success, nearly 70 percent of college graduating seniors matriculating from public and nonprofit institutions in 2013 owed some level of student debt, “with an average of $28,400 per borrower. This represents a 2 percent increase from the average debt of 2012 public and nonprofit graduates,” the report notes.
In Illinois, according to the project’s data, the average debt load per borrower in 2013 was $28,543.
Although the specific details of the President’s plan have yet to be fleshed out, officials from Triton and Oak Park and River Forest High School welcomed the news.
“Increasing ways in which we can provide access to higher education and making college degrees more attainable for our district residents is always a positive move,” said Doug Olson, vice president of Academic and Student Affairs at Triton.
“The preliminary information on President Obama’s proposal of two free years of community college may possibly create a wave of opportunity that would help the economic development of many of our constituents,” he said.
If implemented, there is possibly no district among Triton’s high school feeder districts that would be more affected by the president’s plan than District 200. According to data provided by the district, 80 OPRF graduates from 2013 enrolled at Triton, while 59 from 2014 enrolled in the fall semester following graduation.
D200 Superintendent Steven Isoye said that Obama’s proposal would only add to the district’s arsenal of programs aimed at easing the financial burden of college. For instance, OPRF maintains a scholarship fund for graduates, in addition to a series of enrichment grants designed to fund high school learning experiences that may be paths toward obtaining college scholarships.