Option D: Should community college be free?
Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the claim that community college should be free. Be sure to have a counterargument section.
For research, use Rahm Emanuel’s “A Simple Proposition to Revive the American Dream” and Jay Mathews’ “Maybe tuition-free community college comes at too high a price” and any other relevant sources such as “Here’s the downside of making community college free” by Bruce Sacerdote, “Community College ‘free-for-all’: Why making tuition free would be complicated,” by Dick Statz, “Economists find free community college can backfire” by Jill Barshay, “When Community College Is Free,” by Juan Salgado, “For community colleges, free college has its costs,” by Liz Farmer, and “The potential disaster of free community college” by Biana Quilantan.
Sample Essay Outline for "Should College be Free?"
Paragraph 1, Introduce the crisis of college education and discuss the and how many people are priced out of an education. Clearly, there is a need for free community college. Establishing the need is a good attention-getter, but it’s not an argument. It’s a fact. You can use this fact later in your essay if you decide to support free college education.
You can also use personal experience to create emotional appeal for your essay, showing in detail some of your financial struggles and how zero-cost education would benefit you.
Paragraph 2, Transition to a thesis that argues for or against free community college with 3 supporting reasons.
Paragraphs 3-5 are supporting paragraphs.
Paragraphs 6 and 7 are separate rebuttal-counterargument paragraphs
Paragraph 8: conclusion is powerful restatement of thesis
Should Community College be Free?
One. Rahm Emanuel in The Atlantic argues that community college, like K through 12, should be free.
Rahm Emanuel's essay "A Simple Proposal to Revive the American Dream"
(parenthetical headings are mine)
(History compels taxpayers to make community college free because CC is the equivalent of yesterday's high school.)
During the industrial age, when high school was the gateway to the American dream, public-school systems covered the costs of earning a diploma. Today, however, as associate’s degrees have replaced high-school diplomas as the indispensable ticket into the middle class, families are forced to cover the costs of tuition and more.
(Information Economy requires post-high school education.)
If the information-age economy demands a workforce with additional training, we need to begin cutting students and families the same deal: Anyone willing to work hard and earn the degree should be able to attend community college—for free.
(Free college requires 3.0 GPA. so that by free we mean merit-based) Is this just a “scholarship” for the 1-3%?
Because Washington has yet to shed any real light on how best to do this, each state and city has taken a different tack. Under the terms of the Chicago Star Scholarship, a program that has already enrolled more than 6,000 students, we tied eligibility to academic achievement. If a student at a local public high school maintains a B average, the City will provide a free associate’s degree at a local community college, regardless of immigration status. Then, through a program we call Star Plus, students who have maintained that 3.0 GPA are eligible to receive subsidized tuition at 18 of the four-year colleges located in Chicago, enabling many to graduate debt-free.
At the outset, we chose to make our program merit-based for two reasons. First, we suspected that setting a rigorous academic standard would change attitudes inside Chicago’s high schools. If students in grades nine to 12 know that good grades will earn them a guaranteed free education, they’re further incentivized to run through the tape. (Chicago’s high-school graduation rate grew from 56.9 percent in 2011 to 78.2 percent in 2018.) Second, we theorized that making the scholarship merit-based would help the program avoid the plague of college dropouts—and that’s exactly what’s happened. Chicago Star’s retention rate is 86 percent, well above the national average of 62.7 percent.
(Free includes other costs to expand higher education access to those who are economically challenged.)
Next, we decided to institute a series of carrots and sticks. Unlike some of its sister programs, Chicago Star covers not only tuition, but books and public transportation as well. And we decided to require recipients to complete the program in three years, allowing students to earn their associate’s degree while working full-time, but precluding them from dragging the process out indefinitely. Our shot-clock approach works: 49.7 percent of Chicago Star recipients complete their degree, more than double the national average of 23.6 percent.
The demographic impact is remarkable. More than two-thirds of Chicago Star scholars are Hispanic (compared with 20 percent in Oregon)—and 80 percent are first-generation college students (compared with 43 percent in Tennessee). But proud as we are of these successes, there’s no substitute for rigorous data analysis, and Washington should get in the game of determining which approaches work best. Policy makers in Arkansas, Hawaii, Kentucky, Nevada, and other states working to shape similar programs should know how free community college affects high-school graduation rates, for example, and whether “use it or lose it” time limits drive completion rates. As cities and states serve as laboratories of democracy, our national leaders must look to these programs as models for modernizing and expanding access to higher education.
Counterargument
Two. We see that free community college is no panacea or cure-all in The Washington Post article.
Jay Mathews' "Maybe tuition-free community college comes at too high a price":
(parenthetical headings are mine)
(A CC insider argues that free college isn't the solution: graduating on time is and so is transitioning to a job or a 4-year college.)
Few educational issues, at least the nerdy kind I write about, get people riled up. Angry demonstrators rarely carry banners demanding, “More Research Papers in High School!” or “Down With Credit Recovery!”
But one school issue — free college tuition — has been getting big political play this year. Community college counselor John Mullane wishes that would stop. He has been spending much of his time explaining why free tuition would be bad for his students.
How can that be? Many community college students don’t have much money. Why not make their struggles to get an education easier by making sure they don’t have to pay that bill?
“Providing tuition-free opportunities at public colleges and universities is far superior than the typical hodgepodge of aid packages and loans that are cobbled together by many students,” says the nonpartisan, nonprofit Campaign for Free College Tuition. Some polls show more than 80 percent support for that idea.
Mullane is not allowed to promote his views on state and federal education spending during his working hours at Gateway Community College in New Haven, Conn. His job is to help students negotiate the complicated pathways of learning so they can establish a career and a life. What does he know of legislative politics?
He knows community colleges. He has spent his personal and vacation time doing research and making convincing arguments that getting rid of tuition would make it harder for his students to earn the certificates and diplomas they need.
“States can make college as free as they want,” he told me, “but if they don’t have a system in place to help students get through these institutions and graduate on time, with a college degree that allows them to go directly into a good job or to fully transfer the credits to a bachelor’s degree, they are doing more harm than good.”
(Free college means less resources for other areas resulting in a compromised education.)
The free tuition idea, he said, “involves spending hundreds of billions of dollars and flooding public colleges and universities with new students.” Increased spending on tuition to make sure everyone gets a free ride would mean less money to hire more professors and less money to expand room in the most important classes so that students can get what they need to graduate, he said.
(Free college is no solution to abysmal completion rates.)
Mullane testified before the Connecticut legislature in favor of a bill that would have allowed students to transfer all community college credits to the University of Connecticut and the Connecticut State universities. The two big systems opposed that measure. They said their transfer systems were working fine, despite research showing that only 6 percent of Connecticut community college students are in a degree program that allows them to transfer all their credits to the state universities.
Sixty-one percent of community college students told the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas in 2016 that they could get the certificates and degrees they sought. Yet only 39 percent of community college students get a certificate, an associate degree or a bachelor’s degree from a four-year college within six years.
Only 15 percent of students who begin in a community college ever earn a bachelor’s degree. Traditionally, colleges have fought for more students — something free tuition would give them — but have done little to ensure successful student outcomes because state funding has usually been based on enrollment.
Mullane endorses what many scholars of the community college system say: States need to tear down traditions that keep many students stuck in remedial courses and leave transfer paths to four-year schools that look like a Halloween season cornfield maze.
Mullane said he is pushing for “state laws that mandate statewide transfer pathways for students.” Then, they have to be enforced, he said — which could prove even more difficult. That is not happening with many such laws at the moment.
There is good news in some parts of the country. Florida has one of the best transfer systems in the country. But its reforms are complicated and hard to summarize in one slogan. How can it beat a movement with a banner as simple and compelling as “Free Tuition Now”?
Second Suggested Outline
Paragraph 1, your introduction, summarize Rahm Emanual's case for making free community college.
Paragraph 2, your claim or your thesis, support or refute Emanual's argument by addressing Jay Mathews' objections.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Sample Thesis
While free college education would help a small percentage of low-income students who already have a baseline of writing and math skills, for the most part the argument for free community college is not persuasive when we consider that free things tend to lead to entropy (decline, chaos and worthlessness), free college doesn’t solve the problems of baseline acquisition that would allow students to complete their graduation in a timely manner, free tuition would take away from budgeting for instructors and infrastructure, and free college would only lower the already abysmally low graduation rate.
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