The conservative response to this is typical - you're still dishing out $4000 at will. However, I noticed in this same debate John McCain's health plan, the core of which is a $5000 tax break to be used specifically for healthcare. Where does this money come from? Unless there is a specific accompanying spending cut (and there is none), this is the same as saying you are going to hand out $5000 to everyone to use for healthcare. The difference is that Obama (I believe) plans to incorporate his college education plan into his tax scheme, while McCain does not account for his lost revenue. The 800 lb gorilla - 12 figure budget deficits - is not going away under the McCain administration. Let's be honest.
Next we have McCain talking about his voucher plan for primary/secondary education: give everyone the money they are essentially paying in taxes (plus the money of taxpayers who don't have kids in school) for education, and let them spend it on whatever plan they want. The only difference here is that we do not have to think of a new tax or cost, since it is already built into the system in current taxes. Same idea, though.
But it is also quite similar to Obama's college education plan. Allocate a set amount of funds to anyone who would need it, and they have to use it for that purpose, but they get a whole range of choices. So the government is not providing the education, but it is helping to fund it (that is, society is funding the education, but that is provided under the laws of the free market). To be honest, I think the only objections the Republicans can have with this are 2: (1) that it is a new cost, and neocon knee-jerk reaction is to oppose new costs. I know this because it is the explicit way my Republican neocon office works. Every bill is considered and often questioned on cost before social value. This may not be wrong, but it is a statement of fact. (2) (a) College education is typically a field that requires free thinking and open academic debate, and has been built on this concept; (b) we all know what happens when federal funding comes into play - an institution must meet certain standards - and Washington ideology WILL come into play in this. Some schools (those with religious backgrounds) will feel they cannot participate in the program, and their students will pay attention to the fact that they need an extra 4000 bucks.
Valid objections. However, the same objections play into school vouchers (and to a much lesser extent, the McCain healthcare plan) - and by now we should realize that the Obama college plan is a kind of school voucher.
And then there is this community service element. To be honest, I kind of like it. Get people into community involvement, which is political involvement, of a sort. It is also a great ground to breed maturity, since it is real responsibility. If they slack off they don't get the money. Maybe they could do all the work in one solid year before college - a year in the real world before college always enhances a student's seriousness in the classroom.
Now, it is true that this would essentially shift the onus of supporting college education to the federal government, where it has been held by the states for the last hundred years. I will agree with the Republicans that this is troublesome - but it is not a trump card, and the clever policy proposal needs to be considered in its entirety. These kinds of proposals can have serious debate - which is now impossible on issues such as abortion.
Here is another concern about the plan, though - part of the reason college costs raise about 5-7% a year is that they can. People can get the loans, or pay outright, so colleges will increase the cost. If we take on $4000 that each person now has, I think we only shift the cost $4000 to the right. College will initially be $4000 cheaper, but colleges always have more spending they want to do - research, high tech classrooms, etc. The cost will increase again as people (and the colleges) know they can just get the new money increases in loans, just like they did before.
COUNTERARGUMENT: There are a number of people who cannot afford to go to college at all, who would like to go and are capable of being accepted. They have $5000, but tuition is $9000 - Obama's plan helps them go. The college brings in a new $9000 it did not have before; colleges will immediately be receiving more tuition money under the Obama plan. If they raise the rates, they know they will be losing people at the margins - those that just became able to pay the $9000 tuition, but cannot afford the $10,000. The college knows it has this new money, and will not wish to lose it.
REBUTTAL: Colleges already have people at the margins who cannot afford to pay the slightly higher rates, but costs still go up 5-7% a year - and the students do not drop out (at least not enough to stop the increase). There is only one group of people in America who know the answer this riddle - college students. Many students enter college with enough money and loans to get through at the current tuition rate; rates go up and they cannot afford it. However, once you already have student loans, it is not so hard to figure out how to get more, or how to increase them. Non-students would not have a clue where to begin, but those who already have the loans have a foot in the door, and a vested interest in figuring out how to get that new money (few people want to cut their education short of the degree). Moreover, there is another group with a vested interest in the students finding new loans - the school. Every school has an office full of staff to help out, because the college wants to keep its kids in school, too. So the system is weighted toward those students in college. If they can get in, they will take on more loans than they expected. Under the Obama plan, a new group would be added to this margin, and a new group would be shackled with the very burdensome student loans Obama is trying to relieve.
If this system is hardly different than McCain's voucher plans, we may have reason to fear about those, too. The college-education-costs problem is a free market problem. Karl Marx and David Ricardo (economists not usually grouped together) both noted this when each explained that an employer will generally pay his employees as low as he can to keep them employed and productive. Marx saw the problem of this in a saturated labor market (but confused this with the way future unsaturated labor markets might work, in more of an equilibrium). So part of the way out of the problem is decreased labor - that is, less demand for work and wages. This cannot be factored into the education problem because nobody wants to decrease the demand for education, which is not a material product, though it acts like one when strict market conditions are applied to it. The other way out of the problem is that growth will distribute a certain amount of wealth - we know this to be part of the West's escape from abject labor conditions in early industrialism. However, education cannot receive this solution either, since student loans (which are perceived to be the problem here) already function on an assumption of future increase in wealth. A college student has no money, but with a college education he will earn more in the future; so a loan is simply making that future growth pay for the education. Many people get out of this eventually, because they will earn more money than their loans cost. But some will not. Some cannot make up their mind about their career for a while, and they eventually work jobs that do not require college education or pay high salaries. However, no one sees this coming when they take out the loans.
This is all to say that more loans will not help solve the so-called college education problem, because they are the perceived problem. Actually, this is all to take it a step further and say that if we apply the laws of the free market to primary and secondary schooling as well, the exact same thing will happen. Families with kids already in private schools will stay, but will be able to afford to pay more, so the tuition will rise. Those with kids in public schools will likely move out, especially as new private schools are built, as will inevitably happen under a voucher system. That is, the system will become privatized. Even if we still have public schools, they will have to behave like private schools. At that point there is no rationale for public schools, and they ought to be completely privatized, which would make no difference in the way they would be acting anyway. Regardless of whether they are officially privatized, there will be more elite schools to cater to the wealthy. The middle income folks will get middle education, because that is what they can afford. The poor will get the worst. Everyone will get $5000 to spend, but the poor will have no more than that. The middle income people will have a little more than that - as middle class, they know the importance of education and will pay a little more to get their kids to a better school. As it stands now, you have to pay a lot more to go to a better, private school (the full tuition amount). But with privatization of this education, you could get a little better education for a little more money. These incremental steps are much easier for people to take, and this is similar to the "foot in the door" phenomenon that gets college students to take out a little more for loans once they are in. Eventually, we can see people taking out small loans to help, and then slightly larger. The situation will eventually mirror that of college education.
And of course the final result will be education stratified in the same way as income. Some schools will have high endowments that enable them to accept poorer students (a la Princeton University), and charitable scholarships will help. But we all know what the general skyline will look like: the rich will be in great schools, the middle income folks in decent schools, and the poor in the schools that no one else wants to go to. The good teachers will be lured to the richer schools, because that is where the money will be. The only liberal solution to the new mess will be higher subsidies for the poorer students. We also know this policy path quite well.
The reason for the revulsiveness of this solution is that education is not commidifiable. It should not be packaged and sold like a name brand product (or, if you cannot afford it, the generic brand). Sure - there would be regulation to ensure kids were getting real education, but this only means that education would be regulated like pharmaceuticals. The FDA ensures we get nothing dangerous, but drug companies are free to make their prices. Just like GM sold a "car for every purse" so does every other good product under capitalism. We would get a different kind of school for every income level. It is inevitable.
Public education arose because it was believed that everybody needed a certain level of it, not just those who could afford it, and not even just those who decided to spend the money if they had it (there will always be those who can afford it but choose to spend their money elsewhere - as some do with health insurance). School was made available and compulsory. College education, though, was seen as a non-necessity and therefore left private. While college education has certainly become more needed today, that problem was partly solved 100 years ago with the creation of many of the state universities. The lower and even more affordable level of community colleges was also made available under the state higher education system.
It is without question that a high school degree is necessary in America. One can certainly get by with just that, and the diligent (though poor) are typically able to get an associate's degree at a community college, if it is pursued. Privatizing the high school degree, though, will almost certainly mean that fewer people will achieve it. We must recognize that free markets have benefits (such as identifying problems and incentivizing solutions), but they have many consequences otherwise. Among these are product differentiation, the charging of the highest possible price, shifting payment to borrowing/loans if the product is valued enough, and essentially (and necessarily) viewing the product entirely within its material aspects. Because we chose, in the 19th Century, to view the material hurdles to primary education as less important than their immateral product, we have the public system we do today. While changing that system to a voucher system will give better education to some, we can be certain that some others will receive worse. The conservative opinion must not be to enter down this reckless path.
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