On Friday, President Obama travelled to Tennessee to outline a plan to provide free community college for all. Mere hours had passed since the federal government’s announcement of the latest employment figures, which were encouraging. In December, the unemployment rate stood at 5.6 per cent, the lowest rate since the end of the recession. Beneath those promising numbers, though, clear gaps were evident. For high-school graduates without an advanced degree, the unemployment rate was 5.3 per cent, but for those with a bachelor’s degree, the rate was more than two percentage points lower—2.9 per cent. At Pellissippi State Community College, in Knoxville, Obama told the students in his audience:

You came to college to learn about the world and to engage with new ideas and to discover the things you’re passionate about—and maybe have a little fun. And to expand your horizons. That’s terrific—that’s a huge part of what college has to offer. But you’re also here, now more than ever, because a college degree is the surest ticket to the middle class. It is the key to getting a good job that pays a good income—and to provide you the security where even if you don’t have the same job for thirty years, you’re so adaptable and you have a skill set and the capacity to learn new skills, it ensures you’re always employable. And that is the key not just for individual Americans, that’s the key for this whole country’s ability to compete in the global economy. In the new economy, jobs and businesses will go wherever the most skilled, best-educated workforce resides. Because businesses are mobile now. Technology means they can locate anywhere. And where they have the most educated, most adaptable, most nimble workforce, that’s where they’re going to locate. And I want them to look no further than the United States of America.

Obama’s comments reflected a significant shift in what college means to American society and the U.S. economy. For centuries, it functioned as a social rite of passage for people from a certain background—a place where young, well-to-do men learned about the world, discovered their passions, and had a little fun. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century, especially after blue-collar jobs became harder to find because of outsourcing and automation, that a bachelor’s degree became something more pragmatic—a prerequisite to earning a good, middle-class living. In 1940, five per cent of people in the U.S. over the age of twenty-five had finished at least four years of college. By 2013, that figure had risen to thirty-two per cent. At this point, it’s well understood that there exists a persistent gap in employment rates and wages between those with bachelor’s degrees and those without. On average, those who graduate from four-year colleges are not only employed at higher rates but also earn over fifty per cent more than those with only a high-school degree.

Obama’s response to this problem has been to make college a more practical choice for more people, and to that end he has recently undertaken a number of initiatives, including expanding Pell grants and capping student-loan payments at ten per cent of borrowers’ income. But the community-college proposal is especially notable. It would cover the cost of two years of community college for any student who maintains a grade-point average of 2.5 (about a C+), or higher. The federal government would cover three-fourths of the student’s expenses, at an estimated cost of sixty billion dollars over ten years, and states would be responsible for the rest.

This represents a huge investment, for one thing, but it also represents a shift in how the government—or one influential branch of it, at least—views higher education. The Obama Administration has framed its community-college proposal as the obvious next phase of an expansion that has taken place over the past several decades in the number of years of schooling seen as required for a young person to be educated and which, therefore, ought to be subsidized by the government. In other words, in the Obama Administration’s view, college has become the new high school. The Obama argument in favor of supporting this transformation is, by and large, an economic one rather than a cultural one: people who are college-educated have better employment prospects, and a nation with more employable people is more competitive.

For now, Obama’s proposal remains a proposal. Unlike some of the policy measures he has taken through executive actions, this one would require support from a Republican-led Congress, which isn’t at all guaranteed. G.O.P. leaders have so far been circumspect, and Cory Fritz, a spokesman for the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, has said, “With no details or information on the cost, this seems more like a talking point than a plan.” Some of the proposal’s most vocal critics, perhaps surprisingly, have been those who want to make higher education more affordable but are concerned that such a move would provide free community college to students regardless of their financial situations. An eighteen-year-old with affluent parents would be able to attend for free, just like someone less well off, which seems, to them, like a poor use of resources. In fact, Pell grants already cover the cost of community college for most low-income students, so more-affluent students could receive the greatest net benefit from the plan.

There’s another issue, though, that has received less attention. What about the assumption underlying the proposal, that a college education makes a person more employable? In a blog post accompanying Obama’s announcement, Betsey Stevenson, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, included a chart showing that college graduates earn more than those who have only finished high school. That chart, however, compares the wages of high-school graduates with those of people who finished four years of college—not people who hold the associate’s degrees conferred by community colleges, which Obama’s plan would facilitate.