Discussing free community college would lead to more issues for California

Bobby Bishop, Staff Writer

Free, everyone loves the word free, it means people don’t have to pay for something. But what does it mean when community college is free?

Debt, crowded campuses and a more expensive four-year college.

 California lawmakers are considering free community college and it will be discussed in 2015, according to ABC News.

Many people have not pursued further education due to the cost of community college. That’s what financial aid is for.

It is your choice to further your education it is not the government’s job to make sure every single person attends community college.

Some states are taking money out of the lottery and using that for the money to pay for free community college.

This complicates a multiple of things in California, considering we do use the lottery to pay for a portion of community college. California is a big state.

What if too many people want to pursue and attend community college, and the limited amount of money we have budgeted for this is exhausted?

We will be back where we started, paying for college.

Some other problems with free community college is that some people may start to attend, but if it is free there is no urgency to do well and show up. If you pay for your own classes you don’t want your money to go to waste so you show up and try your hardest to pass. We will be spending money on people who won’t show up and won’t have the drive to graduate.

Just imagine if community college was free. We would have to make more campuses to compensate for all the people who want to attend, which would cost more money. All this boils down to is money, money that we would lose because tuition would be free. We would have to build more campuses, and we would have to hire more professors.

We could always raise taxes to help pay for it. The people love it when we raise taxes right? No, they hate tax raises and will fight against most things to avoid a tax increase.

So do I think we should have free community college? No. The cost for everything would be too extreme and in my opinion it would cause too many issues and we would be back where we started in no time.