I Owe It All to Community College
I have issues with the Obama plan, not because I'm against community colleges, but because I have issues with how this will (probably) be funded (read: taxes).  As a libertarian / ancap who believes taxation is theft, I don't support anything involving spending tax dollars, no matter how noble the end.<p>That said, I'm a community college grad myself, three times over.  I have an A.G.E. (General Education) from Brunswick Community College, and an A.A.S in Computer Programming and another A.A.S in High Performance Computing from Wake Technical Community College.  And I have to say, I'm an unabashed fan of community colleges in principle.  I just want us to find better ways to fund things like this.<p>Anyway, I think so highly of the people who come through the community college system (well, some subset of them anyway), that I've often said that when the day comes that we can afford to hire employees at Fogbeam, I intend to recruit heavily at the local community colleges (Wake Tech, Durham Tech, Alamance Tech, etc.)  I also intend to recruit at the "second tier" universities (UNC-Pembroke, Elizabeth City State, Fayetteville State, NC Central, NC A&T, Shaw, St. Augustines, Peace, Meredith, etc.<p>Why? Well, I believe there are really good people to be found - people who are easily smart enough to have gone to Harvard, Stanford, whatever, but  just didn't for whatever reason.  And if you're recruiting at these schools, you're probably not competing with Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Glaxo Smith Kline, Facebook, etc. for talent.  Instead, you're competing with the local furniture manufacturing plant, the local electric utility, etc.<p>So yeah, community colleges are good.  I'd just like to see more of the scenarios like we had at BCC back in the day.  Some local rich millionaire type (a real estate tycoon) setup an endowment to provide free tuition at BCC for any graduate of any Brunswick County high-school.   I'd love to see a concerted, nationwide effort to build a coalition of philanthropists of this nature to fund this "free college for everybody" thing, instead of taking it out of the federal govt. budget.