IT’S VERY GOOD NEWS that our community colleges are finally receiving the public policy attention they deserve. Kudos to Gov. Healey for her MassReconnect initiative offering free community college to those over 25 and those choosing nursing as a career, and kudos to Senate President Karen Spilka for advancing a proposal to extend free community college to all. A thoughtful, carefully detailed proposal to do just that has recently been developed and made public by the Massachusetts Association of Community Colleges.

Joshua Goodman, a professor at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, writing recently in CommonWealth Beacon, raised two important concerns about free community college. He argued, correctly in my view, that any proposal should be targeted to low-income students and should not subsidize students from higher-income families who would likely attend without such a subsidy. His second concern, which I find less persuasive, is that the Legislature should take care not to make the proposal so financially attractive that students who might otherwise choose to attend a four-year state school be diverted to choose a community college.

In my view there’s a prior question policymakers should be asking: What is the rationale for free community college? Some argue that 12 years of free public schooling is not sufficient preparation for today’s world and that therefore we should add two more years. Given what a wasteland senior year in high school is for so many kids, adding two more years of the same stuff doesn’t seem like a persuasive rationale. 

We need something that clearly differentiates the community college experience from both high school and from the four-year public college experience, a rationale that is compelling for students, community college leaders, and state policymakers. The take-up of career-focused early college is a significant step in the right direction.

Last week the Lumina Foundation released data on how each state is doing on increasing its postsecondary attainment rate. Today, 57.5 percent of 25-34 year olds in Massachusetts have a bachelor’s degree or higher, one of the highest rates in the country. Only another 5.7 percent have a two-year associate’s degree, and an additional 3.8 percent have an industry certification or postsecondary occupational certificate with value in the labor market. These sub-BA attainment numbers suggest significant opportunities for growth.

At a time when the state has over 240,000 open jobs, many in health care and other STEM-related fields that require some postsecondary credential but not necessarily a four-year degree, the institution best situated to close the middle skills gap and create opportunities for economic advancement is the community college. We have not historically looked to our community colleges to play this kind of role in their regional economies, but there are lessons we can learn from the role good community colleges play in other states.

Six months ago my colleague Rachel Lipson and I published America’s Hidden Economic Engines: How Community Colleges Can Drive Shared Prosperity. We profiled five community colleges in different regions and states – Arizona, Mississippi, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia – that do two interrelated things especially well.

First, they operate on the premise that anyone who walks in their door – an 18 year-old just out of high school or a 40 year-old looking for short-term skill training — is there for one overriding purpose: economic opportunity and mobility. 

Second, they recognize that in order to help students meet that goal, they need to position themselves as key players in their regional economic and workforce development ecosystem. Our five case studies, each written by a stellar graduate student, show in some detail not simply what these colleges do, but how they do it, i.e., what internal policies and practices enable them to serve these dual clients – students and employers – so well. 

What are the implications of these case studies for the free community college debate in Massachusetts? Community colleges at their best, as illustrated in our case studies, are the most nimble, flexible, market-oriented institutions in the nation’s postsecondary system. If given adequate resources, there is no reason why our community colleges cannot build the capacity to help shape their regional economies and ensure that their programs are preparing students not just for today’s jobs but for tomorrow’s as well.

This is not an argument for viewing our community colleges as glorified trade schools. The state’s regional voc-tech high schools demonstrate that it is possible to couple high-quality technical education with strong enough core academics to enable their graduates to have real choices: go on to four-year colleges, as most do; get a two-year degree or other credential with labor market value; or go directly into the workforce. 

In my view, all community college degrees should similarly combine academic and labor market-aligned career education, whether designed as terminal or transfer degrees. The sad reality is while 80 percent of entering community college students say they enrolled in order to get started on a four-year degree, six years later fewer than 15 percent have attained such a degree. 

Therefore, all associate’s degrees should be designed to have immediate value in the labor market. National data suggest that associate’s degrees in general studies or liberal arts, unless they incorporate some career-focused courses, have little or no value in the labor market, especially for students of color.

While there is no question that, as Professor Goodman argues, in the aggregate those with four-year degrees do better economically in the long-run than those with two-year degrees or other postsecondary credentials, it is also true that what you study and what skills you emerge with also matter. We have longitudinal data from other states showing that, 10 years post-graduation, the earnings of those with two-year technical degrees keep pace with the earnings of four-year degree-holders.

Given that they serve the highest-need students in our postsecondary system, Massachusetts community colleges are woefully underfunded – a 2020 report from the Center on American Progress estimates the per student funding gap between our community colleges and our four-year public colleges to be nearly $8,000. Additionally, our lump-sum funding allocation to each campus suggests that state leaders have no policy priorities for community colleges that they want to incentivize.

By contrast, Texas recently enacted major community college funding reform legislation, with broad bipartisan support, trading a significant increase in state funding for increased accountability for labor market outcomes of graduates. The legislation specifically targeted new dollars for short-term non-credit programs and for expansion of dual enrollment programs, in which high school students take credit-bearing college courses.

Before we go too far down the road of embracing some form of free community college, we need a conversation among political leaders, business leaders, and community college leaders about the role we need our community colleges to play in our state and regional economies, and the resources required to enable them to play that role. 

If there is no role differentiation between community colleges and four-year colleges, then of course students who qualify for the latter option should take it. Absent such a conversation, and the decisions that follow, I’m skeptical that a free community college policy will serve either our students or our economy as well as it should.

Bob Schwartz is an emeritus professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-founder of the Harvard Project on Workforce.