Pros And Cons Of Debate Essay On Student Debt

Hillard, Smith, Goldberg - Debate Script
Intro:
Today, we stand during a time of a massive student debt crisis. Today, the average student loan debt is $30,000 -- the highest its ever been. Over 40 Million Americans have succumbed to substantial college debt. To address this issue, President Obama has proposed granting incoming community college students free tuition. However, my team, through research and analysis, have come to the conclusion that this proposal is both detrimental to the issue and unnecessary.
Definitions:
Defined by the Department of Homeland Security
Community College- 2-year schools that provide affordable postsecondary education as a pathway to a four-year degree

First Argument:
According to WhiteHouse.Gov, the Federal Pell Grant provides funding for low-income students that otherwise would not be able to pay for tuition. Pell Grant recipients are awarded a maximum of $5,730 a year, of which is more than enough to cover the average community college tuition of $3,800.
Furthermore, the grant covers the cost of of meal plans, shelter, and books. The use of the Pell Grant offers low-income students the ability to attend community college without causing extended academic inflation or inflating the market price of collegiate education.

Second Argument: Today, only a small portion of students successfully graduate from community college and earn a two-year degree. According to US News, an elaborate statistical website on colleges and universities in the U.S; only 4.1% of CUNY students earn a 2-year degree; only 8% of students at Ivy Tech earn a 2-year degree. In addition, only 20% of community college students successfully transfer to a 4-year institution. According to the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, only 22% of students graduate within three years, and 28% graduate within four years. With such low turnout rates, it is unlikely that such a proposal will grant taxpayers a return for their investment.

Third Argument: In the next thirty years, more students will be graduating from post-secondary schools than ever before in the history of modern education due to technology and demography. Due to this explosion in population, the college graduate pool is over-saturated with what is becoming worthless degrees. College graduates are returning home to the parents, many of them without jobs. Forty years ago, a high school diploma was enough to secure a steady career. However, due to heavy subsidizing for K-12, diplomas today hardly suffice. If tuition is granted free-of-charge, then community colleges will have to account for more students flooding the system. Due to this, 2-year degrees will decrease in value, thus causing more academic inflation.
Crossfire questions:
Given by the nature of Obama’s proposal, how will this proposal account for the inevitable academic inflation that is likely to occur?
Do you believe this proposal will adequately assess the diminished incentive for students to succeed?
States have to pay 25% of the bill for this proposal. How do we make sure this initiative does not put a financial burden on states?

Notes:

Introduction: As you’ve heard, the opposition would like to make the claim that, due to the high cost of college tuition, and the monolithic student debt that encompasses over 40 million Americans, the United States should legislate free tuition for community college students.
However, the opposition fails to pragmatically access the situation.

For instance, their claim lacks adequate, objective support. The proposition does not provide predicted statistics of how postsecondary education will enhance the amount of enrollees. Furthermore, the proposition fails to provide a solution to the already overcrowded community colleges that have waitlists in the thousands. According to a survey released by the Los Angeles Times, enrollment during the 2011-2012 academic year in California Community Colleges dropped 2.4 million, with over 470,000 students placed on waitlists. The conundrum at hand was not the student’s tuition, but the $520 million in cuts of the schools’
budgets. Education is undoubtedly the most salient piece for developing and maintaining an industrialized society, and using public funds, correctly, can greatly enhance the quality of education, making it affordable and meaningful. However, the current amalgamation of subsidies have been corrosive in enhancing education. As you all know. K-12 education is heavily subsidized, this has been a direct cause in the devaluation of high school diplomas, in which, on average, the average market value of a high school diploma is roughly 30,000. 7,000 less than an Associate's degree.

If this proposal were to pass, there’s no doubt we’d see the same correlation with public school subsidizing and post-secondary subsiding, in which the market value of post-secondary degrees will decrease due to academic inflation and the infatuation of college degrees in the system. College degrees should be earned through hard work, not be given out through subsidizes. Doing so would allow college degrees to stay within their market value and not overflow the job market with useless degrees.

Allowing students to attend college free from tuition would be impractical if our goal is to achieve higher-equality education. What we should focus on is fundamentally revising and ending the stigma with many school subjects. We should focus on ending standardization and common core that the system was predicated upon by allowing students the freedom to choose their education. In a society that requires more creativity than ever before, we cannot afford to maintain our standardized education system that is heavily subsidized.

Crossfire Questions:
WIth community colleges having a low graduation rate already, what is to ensure it will increase with this proposal?
How does the current proposal of free tuition obviate from the issue of the academic inflation problem in the United States?
Now the proposed solution to this is an increase in taxation to fund more schooling, wouldn’t this pressure more kids to attend a 4-year university afterwards and plummet into debt?
What about the current students that are undergoing substantial amounts of debt from community college, are they thrown out of the equation?
NOTES:

3. Conclusion (Goldberg) In conclusion, my team would like to clarify: Our standing on this issue is not to abrogate people from attending community colleges. Community colleges serve as an extraordinary tool for assisting students in matriculating to higher-level schools and to have a better standing in the job market for a relatively much cheaper price than a 4-year institution. However, we resolve that the proposal of making the first two years of community college tuition free would serve a detrimental purpose in the goal of obtaining more citizens in the middle-class. The larger question that this proposal fails to access is not how to allow students to afford college, but how to make college affordable. There is a major distinction between the two that many fail to comprehend. What we need to focus on as a nation is enhancing the quality of post-secondary education. This proposal only changes education in the form of debt for future generations of taxpayers.
We claim that by investing to expand the Pell Grant program, it would be more effective in helping the students who need financial support in paying for college. We also claim that community colleges can be a difficult time period for many students to succeed in who may have had troubles succeeding in high school.

Therefore, community college tuition should not be free.