WKU President Gary Ransdell says he thinks President Obama’s plan to make community college free has little chance of becoming reality.
In his State of the Union speech Tuesday, the President announced a plan to offer two years of tuition-free community college to students who maintained certain academic standards.
The effort would cost about $60 billion over ten years, with the federal government picking up three-quarters of the cost, and states paying for the rest.
Ransdell says that’s an unsustainable model.
“There’s no way I can be advocate for Kentucky putting money into that and continuing to cut higher education for the public universities," said Ransdell.
Ransdell says he understands that the technical and associate’s degrees that many community college graduates earn help drive the manufacturing sector.
“This is not something that you want to have happen," said Ransdell. "We’re seeing it happen right now in eastern Kentucky because of the fact that they’ve had large numbers of coal miners. And we’ve had some recent coal layoffs in western Kentucky and that’s one of the things we’re looking at right now. Is that going to be of a significant number that we would have to turn around and ask for another one of those?”
Kentucky has cut higher education funding by over 25-percent since 2008.
One of President Obama’s domestic policy advisors said the community college proposal was meant to kick-start a national conversation about ways to make higher education more affordable.
