"Free" Community College?

The President has suggested that 2 years of community college should be "free" for students.  It's an easy thing to say--it buys him some support but doesn't cost him anything, especially since it has a 0% chance of ever being enacted into law.  But even the major Sacramento newspaper, reliably liberal, has questions about its usefulness in California:

It’s unclear what President Barack Obama’s free community college proposal would mean for students in California, which already boasts the lowest fees in the nation and waives costs for 40 percent of its students.

Just what we need, even more people taking classes that will never lead to a certification or degree.

Update, 1/13/15:  From Bloomberg via Instapundit:

“What if people in the policy elite stopped assuming that the ideal was to make everyone more like them, and started thinking about making society more hospitable to those who aren’t? . . . I would argue instead that what’s elitist is our current fixation on college. It starts from the supposition that being good at school is some sort of great personal virtue, so that any suggestion that many people aren’t good at school must mean that those people are not equal and valuable members of society. And that supposition is triple-distilled balderdash.”