I do believe that community college should be free - and that, in the long term, so should university - but I’d like to think about a somewhat related issue.
Naturally, it’s a good idea to have a cheap path to education. But unlike a university education, the thing is that community college has never actually been expensive or unaffordable even for the poor. Where I live, the Pell grant alone covers the cost of CC and then some, and no one I have ever seen struggled to pay for community college. And they’re not bad CC’s - I would actually say that they are both affordable and some of the most effective at providing the kind of education they do.
The problem with CC is that it is not generally a sufficient education. Most of the CC programs are either simple mid-range jobs with a very constricted means for advancement (engineering tech, nursing, etc. where a bachelors is needed for any real career progression), or they are pre-university programs. It’s certainly not a bad idea to give people a chance to get mid-range jobs of course, but I feel that a lot of the reason people don’t particularly care for CC is because of the general stigma that it’s “university or bust” when it comes to getting a good quality job.
A bachelors degree is an awkward middle ground between the real levels of education that people need to get the job done. For people of standard ability, a bachelors degree covers a bit more than they will actually need because it’s a weird sort of compromise between “training standard students for whom it is the terminal degree” and “nurturing students who will pursue further education.” For highly skilled workers, “true entry level” is about equivalent to a masters degree.
I think that in addition to being free, a community college education (and trade school, and vocational education) should be expanded, perhaps into a 3 year degree, that is in fact sufficient for the purposes of getting people the kind of jobs that they would want with just a bachelors degree. That would get people to actually value CC and want to go there.