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In this week’s State of the Union Address, President Obama said that the nation should follow Tennessee’s lead and provide community college for free to all students who can maintain a “C” average.

To do this, he proposed spending $60 billion over the next 10 years. However, if he really wanted to follow Tennessee’s lead, the government wouldn’t have to allocate any new money, and would already have an existing revenue stream in place. Tennessee is paying for its program, Tennessee Promise, out of lottery reserves that have been built up and put into a trust that now provides interest earnings sufficient to fund the scholarships.

“It’s an incredibly innovative and fiscally conservative way to approach this issue,” Mike Krause, executive director of Tennessee Promise, said in an interview last year with online policy site Republic 3.0 when the plan was first taking effect.

Indeed, even Tennessee’s own representatives are saying the feds shouldn’t be involved.

U.S. Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., told the New York Times earlier this month, before the President’s speech, that Obama’s plan was “a top-down federal program that will ask already cash-strapped states to help pick up the tab.”

The plan calls for the federal government to pay 75 percent of the cost of tuition, while participating states would pick up the remaining 25 percent. A multitude of Republican Congressional representatives have declared that there is no chance of Obama’s plan passing in a vote, which raises questions as to why it was proposed at such an impossible time, especially given that the president confidently declared that he’s “got no more campaigns to run.”

Locally, at Mitchell Community College, the federal government already pays the tuition for 60 percent of students, “if not a little higher,” said MCC Director of Financial Aid Candace Cooper, through Pell grants, which are meant for low-income students. Other state grants are also available, Cooper said, and most students do qualify for some kind of assistance.

The people whom Obama’s proposal would help, she said, are those who come from working families whose incomes are too high to fall into the financial aid bracket.

“What we run into are the working families ... and they don’t qualify so those folks don’t receive anything,” Cooper said.

The fee per credit hour at a North Carolina community college is $72, for a two-year degree total of $4,608, a number low enough that Cooper said the college rarely hears from someone who cannot attend because the cost is too high.

“It’s still very affordable,” Cooper said. “I encourage all seniors graduating – this is the place to come.”

Coming at no surprise, Obama’s free tuition proposal was panned by Iredell County’s all-Republican Congressional representatives. U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx called it the wrong approach.

“Rather than yet another top-down federal government boondoggle, we need to focus on new ways to promote innovation, access and completion, which starts with the states and individual institutions that are best suited to tailor solutions to their local needs,” Foxx said in a statement. “The American people want Washington to stop interfering in their lives.”

U.S. Rep. Robert Pittenger echoed Foxx’s sentiments, referring to an “already bloated government.”

“President Obama wants to keep his hand in your pocketbook, keeping more and more of the money earned by hardworking taxpaying Americans to pay for his one-size-fits-all government programs that interfere with your private life,” he said in a statement.

http://www.statesville.com/news/obama-s-community-college-plan-panned-by-iredell-reps/article_a866e2ac-a34b-11e4-8e5f-179f52bb3cc3.html