CampusReform: Some of the nation’s brightest minds recently praised Hillary Clinton’s free college plan, but not without offering some serious criticisms of various elements they consider impractical.
Three leading professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), all experts in finance or business, were interviewed by the school’s business publication on the feasibility of Clinton’s proposal to make college tuition-free, at least for students with a family income of less than $125,000 per year.
Charles Kane, a senior lecturer in global economics, holds a generally favorable view of the proposal but thinks it needs to be tweaked to ensure that “the government isn’t just dishing out money.”
As a solution, Kane suggests requiring all students who take advantage of the plan to perform a year of some sort of public service, whether it be in the military or the Peace Corps.
“This way, if a person takes the credit, it’s a sign they’re committed to going to college—they have some kind of test of intent,” he explained. “If people who took advantage of the plan could serve the government through a social cause, it would also have more chance of passing in an otherwise hampered Congress and Senate.” MORE
Well, a very obvious use of MIT grads in a yearlong program of service to the country would be drawing up plans to repair our crumbling infrastructure.
Hillary’s “free” college will be a big blow to the military; why would anyone enlist, to serve under THIS commander -in-chief, when they could get “free” college without the service and sacrifice required for the GI Bill ?
If they were “experts” they’d extend their rampage to vent against socialism and various forms of statism. Either that or they’re keeping their jobs by dishonestly avoiding it.
@Jarhead, I don’t think they really considered the GI Bill in their calculus. Just tossed in “the military” as their notion of some sort of volunteer service and as a sop to the other side of the aisle. In reality, and as you likely know if the “Jarhead” isn’t just a conjured name, in many instances you barely graduate boot camp and finish a service school before your year is almost up with little/no utility gained to the service for the time and training. I suspect on further study, they may increase that to two or three years in all cases. Further, I suspect this current bunch in/around college age will be opting for the Peace Corps or VISTA, if that’s still around, or something like it if it’s not, especially if they make it a shorter payback. Nonetheless, the Peace Corpsmen will come back a little more real and a little less SJW if they see some real-world strife and squalor, not the manufactured kind they are led to believe they are living in here by pony-tailed, never-been-there, never-done-that academicians.
This would be like the old “Job Corps” program, where basically the Gummint ended up paying young people, most who’d dropped out of high school, to just hang out. No job skills were taught, because the money was wasted, and besides, who wants to learn to WORK, right?
Also, a ONE YEAR military obligation? That’s a joke, unless you’re going with the Iranian program of teaching your recruits to be human land-mine detectors or human wave attackers. A year. Hah!
Free college tuition where? MIT? Yale? Butler university?
As a parent of a senior we are just starting to figure out how we are going to afford this.
Private colleges are $45,000 a year. State colleges are less but have no money for us. Academic scholarships are virtually gone. Need based, minority and division 1 athletic is all that’s left. Own a home or have a combined income of 100,000 k or more and you are virtually on your own. We’ll find a way to make it work, we always do but At some point it is not going to be worth it for me to keep my engineering business. I’ll go work part time at Starbucks and get the government to pay for it all instead of working my ass off to pay for everyone else’s stuff.
How about no tenure for professors who haven’t done military service or created a private business that has created at least 10 private-sector jobs that lasted 3+ years.
Indeed, Criscitello raised many legitimate concerns with Clinton s proposal, including her plan to set the income threshold at $125,000, which he points out would not make for an equitable approach, given the disparate costs of living across America s cities and states.