This was my post in the major thread about it:
What a terrible idea. This will cost ridiculous amounts of money when you could do the same exact thing for far cheaper, and you probably wouldn't want/need to do that either.
An OK idea would be to offer online courses equivalent to a 2-year degree in any field you want, and certification at the end of completion. That shouldn't cost so much, although with the federal government implementing it I'm sure costs would skyrocket. And even with this idea comes the unintended consequence same as the notion that, "everyone should go to college": The degree itself gets devalued, and employers start to look for additional education beyond that. When everyone has an Associate's Degree, it will be worth about as much as a High School Diploma.
Add to this the fact that the only step you really need someone else for is the certification. MIT, Yale, and other schools are already offering open courseware with video lectures taught by world class professors for free, and in the age of the internet the rest of the information is available at your fingertips if you only were to seek it out. I hate to say it as a teacher myself, but brick-and-mortar education can more or less go the way of the Dodo. All we need is some solid system of affirming knowledge learned (although employers can and do do that at job interviews, realistically you're not getting to the interview stage without something proving you probably know your stuff). Does anyone seriously think you need to go to college to learn even an advanced skill like computer programming? There are vast resources for it everyone online, all for the cost of internet access. See how silly $30,000/year seems now? But I bet Obama or other similar thinkers would propose we just pay that for people too.
Yet, stuck in an absurd idealistic time warp, we're going to spend billions to send people to those brick-and-mortar places for free? Only to devalue the accomplishment? Where no motivation or personal stake on the goer's part will be required to spend everyone else's money? It's the perfect example of well-meaning, and yet so damaging and wrong-headed. The hell of good intentions.