President barack Obama says 9 million students could benefit from his plan to make at least two years of community college education free of charge. This proposal featured in his state-of-the-union address on January 20. If all 50 states go along with it, a typical full-time community-college student could save $3,800 a year, he claims. Students must maintain a 2.5 grade-point average (C+) to qualify. Uncle Sam would cover 75 percent of the cost; the states would pick up the rest. The White House says the tab will be $60 billion (Rs.373,379 crore) over ten years.
Community colleges are publicly funded local institutions which offer vocational courses or prepare students to transfer to a four-year university programme. President Obama calls them œessential pathways to the middle class and praises their flexible schedules: œThey work for people who work full-time. They work for parents who have to raise kids full-time. They work for folks who have gone as far as their skills will take them and want to earn new ones, but don™t have the capacity to just suddenly go study for four years and not work.
Tuition is typically $3,300 per year ” far less than at a university. Quality varies. Some courses are excellent; others are out of date or ill-matched to local job markets. Only 20 percent of full-time students at community colleges earn an associate™s degree within three years ” and it is supposed to take two.
The president™s scheme might encourage Americans deterred by the price tag to study. But for many students community college was already free or nearly so. Financial aid averages around $5,000 per student per year. Anyone from a family that makes less than $24,000 (Rs.14.40 lakh) a year also qualifies for a Pell grant of up to $5,730 (Rs.3.43 lakh) a year ” an already generous (by Indian standards) scheme that Obama has expanded.
Obama™s new plan is loosely based on the Tennessee Promise, a state programme backed by both Republicans and Democrats. It is also similar to a scheme in Chicago. However, a Republican Congress is unlikely to fund another federal spending spree, even if the cost to taxpayers is only $6 billion (Rs.36,000 crore) a year (4 percent of the federal education budget). Lamar Alexander, a former secretary of education and now a Republican senator representing Tennessee, says he would like to expand the Tennessee Promise, but thinks such programmes should be left largely to the states, not the federal government.
New deserving elite phenomenon
œMy big fear, says Paul Ryan, an influential Republican congressman from Wisconsin, is that America is losing sight of the notion that œthe condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life. œOpportunity, according to Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, œis slipping away.
Before the word meritocracy was coined by Michael Young, a British sociologist and institutional entrepreneur in the 1950s, there was a different name for the notion that power, success and wealth should be distributed according to talent and diligence, rather than by accident of birth: American. For sure, America has always had rich and powerful families, from the floor of the Senate to the boardrooms of the steel industry. But it has also held more fervently than any other country the belief that all comers can penetrate that elite as long as they have talent, perseverance and gumption.
But something else is now afoot. More than ever before, America™s elite is producing children who not only get ahead, but deserve to do so: they meet the standards of meritocracy better than their peers, and are thus worthy of the status they inherit.
This is partly the result of various admirable aspects of American society: the willingness of people to give money and time to their children™s schools; a reluctance to impose a uniform model of education across the country; competition between universities to build the most lavish facilities. Such traits are hard to fault and even if one does object, they are yet harder to do anything about. In aggregate, though, they increase the chances of wealthy parents passing advantage on to their children. In the long run, that could change the way the country works, the way it thinks about itself, and the way people elsewhere judge its claim to be an exceptional beacon of opportunity.
Part of the change is due to the increased opportunities for education and employment won by American women in the 20th century. A larger pool of women enjoying academic and professional success, or at least showing early signs of doing so, has made it easier for pairs of young adults who will both excel to get together. Between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 to 48 percent, and the change shows no sign of going into reverse.
Those whose parents have provided good schooling and good after-schooling have advantages already ” but some get an extra one from institutions that discriminate in favour of the children of alumni. According to a survey by the Crimson, Harvard™s newspaper, 16 percent of the 2,023 who got in last year had at least one parent among the university™s alumni. Harvard says legacy preference is only a tie breaker in determining admissions; but with 17 applicants for every place, there can be a lot of ties.

(Excerpted and adapted from )