The American Enterprise Institute
The plan has many forebears. Obama clearly took some inspiration from the Tennessee Promise, a program started by Republican Governor Bill Haslam that provides tuition-free community college to any Tennessee 12th grader who wants it. (We don’t yet know a thing about whether the program has helped students who would not have finished college otherwise.) Other voices have called for a federally-funded “public option” for higher ed. University of Wisconsin professor Sara Goldrick-Rab, proposed a free two-year option last spring. Before that, the American Federation of Teachers’ Robert Samuels published a book on the subject. What to make of it? I’ve written about the pitfalls to the free college idea a few times (see here, here, and the conclusion to Reinventing Financial Aid). To summarize some of the main ideas:
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