It may be different for each state, but the cost of even Community College has increased quite a bit in the last decade. I'm attending one of the cheaper colleges in my state and tuition costs alone are about $4,000 for a full credit year. This does not include things like books or transportation. I'm now going part-time and still have another year and a half to go, but the total cost for me so far has been about $7,200. The doesn't even take into account the return in education you're getting which I believe to be sub par compared to University courses I've taken.

While I'll gladly take the cheaper degree compared to those offered in universities, it isn't as cheap as most people anticipate. Many of my co-workers talk about it in a similar fashion and are quite surprised when I show them what I'm being charged.

In California Community Colleges, tuition is about $46/unit or $500/semester for a typical workload. Plus the community colleges have fee waiver for low income individuals. Books can be expensive but from my experience, I could get a semester bus passes for students quite cheap. Cal grants may cover the rest if you are low income from my own experience they are quite generous.

I did 3 semesters of community college. Calculus 2, 3, DiffEq, physics 2, 3, chem 1 and 2... It was pretty rigorous, and dirt cheap.

Why can't this model be extended into a 4 year school for twice the price?

I don't know if this is unique to Florida, but most of the community colleges here became state colleges, thus enabling them to provide certain bachelor's degrees.

I was thinking for a bachelor's degree, and in that instance at the community colleges + cheap state school you're looking around $10-20k for tuition plus ~four years of living costs (assuming full-time). You could do it for less, but there's no question it's a lot if you're making minimum wage.

Does the Pell Grant cover people in this case?

I had friends who were working class but not poor and they got that for school.

Full Pell Grant was $5,500 when I received it. And with that being said, it's not necessarily a good thing if people end up using it to go to college to get a degree in an art that they can't use for a good job. (Although I still largely disagree with universities being a vehicle for job training).

Some, not all

cali community college is around 500-600/semester in tuition. you can get the tuition waived completely if youre from an economically disadvantaged background.

People know their options.

Let's be real... outside of trade professions like programming/carpentry/plumbing/etc. an associates degree is barely a step up from a GED (and sometimes worse: "Why didn't you just take the extra two years and get your bachelors???"). It also doesn't really matter how cheap it is, the main cost for the community college demographic is the opportunity cost. Most don't have support structures to give them the basics while they are at school, so they have to support themselves PLUS earn an extra 2.5k in disposable income, and then keep up with their studies on top of all of that. And since an associates gives you extremely limited social mobility in comparison to a bachelors most just forgo it, often replacing school with an extra job.

In terms of social mobility a college degree is the new high school degree, anything less is exactly that and will not give you sufficient social mobility especially when you're on the lower end of the spectrum to begin with. We need to accept this and begin treating college like we did high school, making it free and standardized for everyone. The only other option I can see is trying to radically change social norms that have developed over the past 30-40 years and I just don't think that's feasible outside of select industries like ours.

That would just make a masters the new collage degree.

The real problem is a huge swath of the US economy is based on reputation not ability. Exclusivity is the goal, so the more people reach benchmark X, the further companies will move the benchmark.

That's an impossible problem though, isn't it? Reputation was used as a proxy for ability until it became an end itself, but until we can correctly attribute some metric of ability (which sounds slightly dystopian) before hiring people we will continue to rely upon proxies to inform our decisions.

Of course, you really don't have this problem in economies where middle class jobs aren't scarce...

IMO, it has to do with how zero sum much of the economy is.

A factory cares about it's absolute production vs cost. However, a lawsuit is based in part on relative skill.

I'd rather take it a step backwards. Instead of making college free and standardized, fix high schools so that a diploma means something and your entire populace does have a foundation.

High school already doesn't mean anything, making college free and standardized means that college becomes not just a defacto expectation but something everyone has to do and there's really no point in that when we have the level below that underperforming.

Both are monumental tasks, though.

I'd agree, but don't think that's quite possible. At least with college you can have selection even if it's free, but high school is mostly mandatory, so the curriculums will always revert to whatever shuttles the most kids through the fastest.

I think the real genius of making college free is not making it mandatory (of course, easier said than done). It's there if you need it and want to take the next step in your education, but for those who would rather not be there or would do something else that should be a viable option as well, and then you don't have to marginalize the education across the board.

That selectivity thing has more to do with how we fund and operate schools and less with the requirements of education.

If you look at NYC, they have a model of neighborhood elementary schools and location based high schools, but also a network of merit based advanced and magnet schools.

When I was in high school in a rural upstate NY town, we had tracked programs with "smart" and "not so much" kids and rarely interacted directly with kids more than one track up or down in school. (There was only 90 kids in the graduating class)

It was a real eye opener when taking some mandatory class as a senior (something like civics) when I discovered that my writing partner didn't really know how to read or write. To me that's the tragedy of schools -- that should not happen.

High school is both mandatory and selective. Most schools have multiple tracks: vocational, general, college prep, honors / ap. Also private and some public high schools, like specialized magnet schools, can be more selective in admissions than many universities.

In small towns the tracks may end up being a couple of different english and math classes, band vs autoshop (if either is funded) and how much chemistry/physics you complete.

Just let people stop going to high school at age 16 and make the last 2 years more rigorous.

There need to be other changes to go with that, but the people electing to stop school would be happier and I think wouldn't miss out on much learning.