THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY TO DO SECOND CHANCES.

Reason's Steven Greenhut argues, "Making Community College 'Free' Will Harm Serious Students."

Community college already is dirt cheap, at $46 a credit. Making it free will only assure that people who aren't particularly serious about getting an education will take up space in sought-after classes, thus making it tougher for others to get into their preferred classes. This sounds harsh, but people unwilling to invest $1,100 a year in their own education perhaps ought to find something else to do. There is nothing like spending one's own money to force people to take the coursework seriously.

There are many ways to come up with that relatively small amount and the state already waives fees for the poorest students. And adding additional student aid through Cal Grants will help some people pay for four-year universities, but one of the reasons that college tuition has soared well beyond inflation – and beyond the prices of most consumer goods—is that the aid itself is inflationary.

Let's walk that cat backwards.  The state already mandates attendance in the common schools, up to the age of sixteen or eighteen or through the tenth or eleventh grade, depending on the jurisdiction, and that benefit is sometimes ill thought of by disengaged or disruptive students, who perform poorly and wreck teacher morale.  (Teachers, like non-commissioned officers, spend eighty percent of their time on twenty percent of their charges, most of that attempting to straighten out the screw-ups.)

But consigning the kid who is a screw-up at ten or fourteen or sixteen to a life of penury and misery isn't smart either.  Thus there's the GED equivalency testing to get into a college or a trade without the benefit of a high school diploma or a hitch in the military, and sometimes that pays off, although there's still some difference in the performance of GED matriculants compared with the holders of diplomas, and that difference might reflect unobservable differences in intangible human capital.

The education establishment in the United States could sort and track youngsters starting at an earlier age, the way the Germans do, and the way high-achiever parents do when they enroll their spawn in Ivy League Prep Day Care, but perhaps part of the problem is that well-meaning policy makers have pronounced anathema on inculcating the habits of the upper middle class, which is really all that Ivy League Prep Day Care does.

At the same time, free and open admission, particularly with generous add-drop provisions, leads to the situation Mr Greenhut writes of, in which not-terribly-engaged students sign up for courses, thus causing them to be closed more quickly, then their lack of preparation lowers the general level of rigor in the courses, and then those generous drop deadlines mean no failing grades on their transcript.  I saw that often enough at Wayne State years ago.