A friend of mine worked for some time in Tokyo in the 1960s and knew the city and its public transit system well. He once recounted to me his first ride on a crowded early morning bus. At one stop, a student boarded and made his way toward the rear section when, to my friend’s surprise, an elderly woman rose and gave up her seat so that the student could sit down.
The student was in uniform, as was the custom there, and, as my friend, having learned more about it, explained to me, it was also customary to show them deference. The Japanese culture contained a deeply embedded recognition that students were their future and deserving of adults’ respect and encouragement.
Recently, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan proposed a way to demonstrate that view of the importance of students and education. She did so with two proposals. The first would underwrite the existing bus pass system to cover high school students and needs no rigorous analysis. The second would offer new high school graduates the opportunity to further their education, tuition free, at any of the city’s three community colleges.
Naturally, the financial side remains murky. The city doesn’t actually “have” the money for either proposal, and, initially at least, plans to obtain the funding by means of wishful or creative accounting.
Like an artist or a craftsman whose skills are burnished by experience, Seattle posesses a polished talent for spending money it doesn’t have.
One of the negative side effects of skilled persistent deficit spending, though, is that budgeting of all types — real, wishful, careless, or deceptive — come to dominate our thinking and judgment on ideas. It becomes more and more difficult to sort out the good ideas from the bad ones. They all begin to sound alike.
Such is the case with Durkan’s proposals on tuition-free community colleges. Because funding clouds its evaluation, it would be useful to take an initial look at the merits of this proposal and worry about the financing as a separate issue.
The tuition-free community college sounds appealing, but its unintended side effects provide reasons why we should take a closer look. The “Tennessee Model” is the pattern for this proposal but the program there, like so many government programs, has thus far been analyzed for its enrollment impact not for its effectiveness as an educational improvement.
The Tennessee “Promise” model is a state-wide program that offers recent high school graduates tuition-free two-year associate degree or certificate programs at any public community college in the state. It is a “last dollar” program, so participants must apply also for federal aid, which, if granted, would be deducted from their Tennessee Promise grant. Applicants also are assigned a state-funded mentor, must attend some mandatory meetings, and must apply and be accepted by the community college. The bureaucratic complexity may explain the less-than-stunning growth in participation in this essentially free program.
All the paperwork and processing, though, does achieve at least one important result: it keeps alive the hope that those who participate in the program are probably capable of college level academic work. Essentially, it resembles a very large scholarship program for worthy students.
Durkan’s proposal, though is very different in that the only requirement is a recent high school diploma. Whether the sorting out process will be further refined by the three community colleges — in terms of acceptance into specific programs, for example — is not clear at this time.
The mayor’s proposal deserves praise for its simplicity. The stark truth is that an alarming portion of high school graduates are completely unprepared to succeed at college-level academic work. The result in higher education has been an unsightly composite of remedial courses masquerading as college curriculum, a generalized lowering of academic standards, and a painful expansion of student failures and drop-outs.
Community colleges are better equipped to address the problem of student unpreparedness than four-year institutions. Still, it will not be easy to absorb thousands of students, attracted by a free program, with unknown and untested academic capabilities.
A critical look at this proposal would see it as rewarding mediocrity and simply a way to extend our K-12 system failures to the community college level. A more balanced view would be that our community college system has very successfully offered so many people a “second chance” at changing their lives for the better.
This isn’t Japan, and it isn’t the 1960s. We are not likely to see bus riders on the Rapid Ride E Line giving up their seats to students any time soon. But even if it is a child of our K-12 failures, Durkan’s offer of a second chance isn’t a bad idea.
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