El Camino students are thriving off the incentive to pass classes so they don’t waste the money they spend on tuition.
Junior colleges should not be free because if the student can fail a class and take it again for free, he or she won’t be pushed into going to class.
The average published yearly tuition and fees of public two-year colleges is $3,347 according to collegeboard.org.
Although it is not as much as a four-year college, the two-year price is just as much of an incentive for the student to get done quickly.
With the amount of financial aid, scholarships and grants offered at EC, the price can drop by qualifying and applying for them. Being awarded and receiving one of these financial boosts is a huge help when it comes to the tuition.
The EC website also has the option of the “net calculator” to figure out roughly the cost of the students’ school year and takes into account possible financial aid.
Although some students do have a goal to pay for the classes they need and to transfer, other students that aren’t as driven leads to funding for junior colleges to trend downward.
“A shocking 70% of California’s community college students fail to graduate or transfer,” according to a study from communitycollegereview.com.
Making junior colleges free will not change the common statistics among community colleges throughout California.
The funding that goes into community colleges can backfire and cause more financial strain to the university funding. If students are not realizing the opportunity they are given, why give it to them for free?
“Adding up state and local funding of community colleges and state and federal grants to students, the bill for early failures over the five years was almost $4 billion,” according to a study from usnews.com.
With free classes, the population will go up along with class growth and thus making it more difficult to receive the classes needed to transfer. Students already have trouble registering for these classes as it is.
The only thing that matters is if the student successfully completes the courses they need, not the cost. Therefore students who are willing to fight for their degree, will.
“Completion matters, and recent studies have shown that affordability is only part of what hinders community-college students,” according to a business article in wsj.com.
