President Barack Obama’s scheduled announcement of his proposal to offer free tuition to the country’s community colleges, with no plans about how to fund it, is a "pipe dream," according to
the National Journal.
"It resembles Obama's proposal in 2013 for a universal pre-K program for 4-year-olds," according to Journal writer Fawn Johnson. "To provide free public pre-K just for low-income families, it would cost $75 billion over 10 years."
Obama will include his America’s College Promise proposal in his Jan. 20 State of the Union address, though the official announcement will be Friday at a Tennessee community college.
On Thursday Obama announced the program in a Facebook post and on Twitter.
He wants to offer free tuition to students who maintain a 2.5 grade point average at community colleges that offer credit toward a four-year degree. The proposal could benefit as many as 9 million students.
His plan is for the federal government to pay for 75 percent of the cost and participating states to cover the remaining 25 percent, something that could be construed as "a federal intrusion into states' turf," according to the Journal.
"With no details or information on the cost, this seems more like a talking point than a plan," Cory Fritz, a spokesman for Republican House Speaker John Boehner, told
The New York Times.
There are major hurdles for Obama’s proposal to clear, beginning with getting through a GOP-controlled Congress and winning the support of states that would have to agree to cooperate.
According to the Journal, the program is modeled after free community college initiatives in Tennessee and Chicago, which are funded through state lotteries.
In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, Cecilia Muñoz, the White House’s domestic policy director, and Ted Mitchell, undersecretary of education, declined to discuss the price tag of the proposal, according to
The Washington Post, which reports that the cost "appeared likely to range into tens of billions of dollars over a decade."
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.