“I’ve got two kids in college”: Eileen Laubacher says college costs are “unbelievably painful”
FoxTalk asked Eileen Laubacher what she would do to reduce college costs for working and commuting students. The retired rear admiral and congressional candidate said community colleges need more investment, more online access and lower costs.
DENVER. Eileen Laubacher said college costs are personal.
“I’ve got two kids in college right now myself, and I know how unbelievably painful that is,” Laubacher told FoxTalk at DemFest.
Laubacher, a retired Navy rear admiral running for Congress in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, answered a FoxTalk question about reducing college costs for working and commuting students after her DemFest session.
She said community colleges need more investment, lower costs and more access points, especially in parts of her district where students do not live near a campus.
“We need to be working on investing in community college even more,” Laubacher said. “We need to be making sure that, first of all, it’s more available.”
Laubacher said some students in her district face a basic distance problem.
“We have real challenges in my district, because not everybody has a community college that is close to hand,” Laubacher said.
She said online programs should be part of the answer.
“We need to make sure that we’re opening up more online opportunities and reducing the cost of community college so that people can enter into that in a reasonable way,” Laubacher said.
Laubacher also said students should have more chances to take jobs that help pay for college.
“I think that we need to look at opportunities for encouraging people to be able to take jobs that help to pay the cost of college,” Laubacher said.
Her answer focused less on a single national promise and more on access: whether students can reach a community college, whether online programs are available and whether families can avoid taking on too much debt.
“I know how unbelievably painful that is to try to figure out how much debt are we going to take on to be able to get the education,” Laubacher said.
Earlier in her DemFest session, Laubacher spoke about military leadership, women in the military and national security. Afterward, her answer to FoxTalk returned to a local student problem: how far students have to travel, how much they have to borrow and whether community college is close enough to be a real option.
“We need to think about that,” Laubacher said. “How are we going to make it more for people, and how are we going to do that by virtue of investing in the future?”
