“Free community college” is an appealing idea. Its plain language meaning is clear: No tuition or fees at any public college that focuses on two-year degrees.

But a look at how the American higher education system is actually structured shows that this notion is much more complicated than it sounds. Ultimately, it underscores how hard it is to base good higher education policy on institutional and degree classifications instead of outcomes. There’s a simpler, better way to achieve the free community college promise.

Photo: Mike Schenk

Last month, a shooter killed eight people in Atlanta, six of them women of Asian descent. This after months of news about Asian-looking people in America being harassed and beaten by those who blamed them for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Asian American student groups say they’re tired of it all—of having to learn, and to teach other students, about Asian American history on their own. They're demanding discussions about anti-Asian bias on campus, courses and programs in Asian American studies, the creation of an inter-Asian center for students. Many of these demands outline changes student groups have been advocating for years, but the tragedy in Atlanta, they reason, could create fresh urgency for administrators to act.

Merger is something of a taboo word in higher education, given that most of them are takeovers in which one college usually disappears. But as financial, demographic, and other issues force many colleges to consider significant changes in how they operate, cross-institutional collaboration of one sort or another is likely to grow.

This episode of The Key examines the growing pressures on colleges to consider working with other institutions to bring significant changes in how they fulfill their missions—and the structural and cultural barriers that tend to make cross-institutional collaboration so hard to pull off.