At the beginning of last year, President Obama called for community college to be free nationwide, a tall order that has yet to become a reality given pushback from Republicans in Congress opposed to Washington intervening in what many see as a state issue. Later in 2015, he announced the creation of a coalition of community-college leaders involving partnerships with local businesses, K-12 teachers, and foundations to pilot free community-college programs at state and local levels. So, even as nationwide free community college remains elusive, a number of states and cities have enacted their own versions of the idea. Tennessee’s Republican governor launched a statewide version in 2014 that frequently serves as a model. Oregon and Minnesota have followed suit. So have major cities like Detroit, Salt Lake City, and Boston. Lawmakers from more than 10 states have introduced legislation, and the issue appears to be gaining momentum.

But there’s no guarantee that momentum will be maintained. While Hillary Clinton has touted a plan to make not just two but four years of college free for students from families earning up to $125,000, the chances of such a proposal becoming reality anytime in the near future may be slim, and it’s unclear how much attention she’ll devote to community colleges specifically.

Back at the vice-presidential residence, Biden thanked the college leaders before her for giving her the “opportunity” to inform White House officials about the benefits of community colleges. “You have educated me [about community colleges],” she told them. But it’s not a world Biden necessarily needed help understanding. Her own dissertation at the University of Delaware looked at how community colleges could retain students. And in a rare move for a vice-presidential spouse, Biden took a paying job as a professor at Northern Virginia Community College shortly after moving to Washington, D.C., in January 2009. She has continued to teach throughout both terms of the Obama administration. “I have to continue to teach,” she said she told her husband. “I’m not a lady who lunches.” (Realizing she’d just made the remark at a luncheon, she jokingly clarified that the gathering was a “meeting with lunch.”)

The vice president, who cannot resist stopping by a party when it is happening in his own home, made a surprise appearance at the reception and, in typical fashion, cheerfully shared several anecdotes about Dr. Biden’s work. She carries a bag all over the world of papers to be graded that “weighs about 300 pounds,” he said. “I’ll say to her, ‘Put! The! Bag! Down!’” he joked. The vice president also gently ribbed his wife for delivering one of her oft-quoted lines about community colleges being the “best kept secrets in the country” as drivers of economic mobility to the commander in chief, to which Obama apparently quipped in reply, “Oh really?”