Biden Directs Education Funding to Community Colleges, a Key Lifeline

President Biden’s proposal calls for community college to be free for all Americans, which may relieve some of the burdens saddling low-income and working-class college students.

After she got divorced in 2015, Sonia Medeiros, 48, knew she had to earn a college degree. She needed to support herself and her young son, but employers were not responding to her résumé, which showed only a high school education from her native country, Brazil. The coronavirus pandemic made everything worse. She lost her job in food services and sometimes struggled to afford groceries, rent and car insurance payments. She could not look for new paid work, she said, because her 13-year-old son’s school shut down often because of virus cases. Throughout, her federal Pell grant to pay tuition at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, where she is studying nutrition and culinary management, was an essential source of stability. There are more than five million students, many of them from low-income families, enrolled at the nation’s 1,000 community colleges. Like Ms. Medeiros, many of them stand to see a considerably strengthened lifeline to the middle class in the sweeping higher education provisions in President Biden’s $1.8 trillion American Families Plan.