Two years of free college tuition?

During his State of the Union Address, President Obama focused briefly on a proposal to provide free tuition for two years of community college education. This is an intriguing idea and it deserves a close examination.

I have experience at various levels of higher education and have served as president of two public community colleges and two smaller private universities. With my history you may think I have a vested interest in President Obama's free tuition proposal. In truth, all of us have a vested interest in this idea. The questions to ask are 1) Why should we do it? And 2) How much will it cost?

There are many positive reasons to affect this free education proposal that will benefit both our young people and our economy. However, I will focus on only one, and it is negative. Our high schools are not measuring up to the standards set in other countries with whom we must compete in the international marketplace. It isn't my intention to infer that our high schools are inferior. In truth, we are No. 1 in the world in every measure of high school education from facilities to qualified teachers, except one. We don't send our young people to school as many hours in the day or as many days in the year as students in places like China, Japan, Finland and Germany. A student in China goes to school from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m. six days a week, and their school year is 240 days each year.

By comparison, an American student gets 6 hours a day on a 180-day school calendar. Is it any wonder that Chinese students score higher on standardized tests than American students? That extra time in the classroom computes to the equivalent of two additional years of instruction by the time they leave high school.

There are only two ways to increase the instructional time for our students, lengthen the school year or add additional years onto the end of high school. Proposals to lengthen the school year have failed, perhaps we can add the additional two years at the end.

Cost is a key factor, of course. But, we should remember that our government already pays college tuition for a significant number of students through military veteran's benefits, Pell grants and other subsidies. If the first two years were free it would cut back significantly on those current costs. And, we already have the facilities, technology and the teachers needed to effect this proposal.

What remains is to figure out what to cut in our country's many-trillion-dollar budget to come up with the necessary six-billion dollars a year we will need to fund this project. If we are to compete in the world market in the future, can we do otherwise?