A conversation that I had yesterday with my 14-year-old son, Thomas, prompts me to pose this question: would college education in the U.S. be improved if it, too, were supplied in the same manner as K-12 schooling is supplied?
That is, would the quality of college education in the U.S. rise (or at least not fall) if every American were assigned to a government owned and operated college nearest to his or her residence? (Thomas, for example, would be assigned to George Mason University.) Tuition at these colleges would be $0.00; these colleges’ expenses would be funded exclusively through taxes. Each college student would be unable to attend any government college save the one to which he or she is assigned (although students would retain the right to attend privately owned and operated colleges that would sustain themselves by charging tuition).
Finally, truancy statutes would be enhanced to require schooling through grade 14 (that is, through a student’s sophomore year in college).
Would this arrangement work? Would it improve the quality of post-secondary education in America?
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Your tone sounds as though you’re asking this as a serious question about which you are unsure. Yet somehow I don’t think you’re unsure at all.
Unfortunately, my effort to seriously analyze the effect of this is hampered by my own inability to get past the status quo disparity in school quality at what would be our starting point–a sort of endowment effect issue. That is, I live approximately equidistant from University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan Universities, which are only a few miles from each other. Which one my child was assigned to would dramatically affect how I (as a parent, not as an objective analyst) would evaluate the policy. But of course that’s not the question being asked.
Do you believe that the U. of M. would continue to be as good a university under the scenario suggested in my blog post?
Mr. Boudreaux,
No. But I find myself stuck on the question of whether it would even out in quality with EMU, or always remain better. That is, I’m not in disagreement with you, but somehow your question sidetracked me onto a different one that I find harder to answer.
I imagine that the wealthier residents of the area would move into the UM district, (or get it redrawn), and that UM would stay excellent (or at least quite good), while EMU would rapidly degrade. Obviously all conjecture, but just intuition.
What!? Next you’ll be telling me that math teachers already know how to solve the equations they write on the board. The nerve of some people, asking a question to encourage others to think about the answer. Who do they think they are?
Would the supplier offer a better or a worse product if customers had fewer choices? Hmmmmm.
Not only would the public universities with an assigned student population decline in quality (over time), many of the marginal/smaller/weaker private institutions would be put out of business (early in the life of this policy, and before the serious decline of the public institutions) as the difference in cost would be too much to justify for a much large percentage of the college student population.
Difference in what cost? I thought there were no cost involved in this “fairy tale”.
What are you drinking?
Taxes are a cost.
There’s a distinction between a “cost” and a “price” The costs would rise, with the increase in attendance and the decrease in performance (as in K-12). The price would be hidden from the consumer, giving him/her, nor his/her parents any apprecation of value.
(emphasis added)
I think this model already exists to a large extent in the form of community colleges.
As a practical matter, motivated parents would shop colleges just as they shop public schools, when buying a home. There would be some excellent ones, but most would be insufficient.
Under current funding methods (property taxes), affluent areas would have better schools, and those good schools in less affluent areas would, over time become more affluent. Most in poor areas, would have poor schools. Most disadvantaged would stay that way.
There would be no need for specialization. Even average universities now have some exceptional departments. If you couldn’t attract the best students from all over, I think this would diminish.
And don’t you just LOVE NCLB? All of those good universities would be full of idiots who need the ‘advantage’.
This is a silly post because it’s not meant to be a serious discussion. The answer would be the quality would decline. A far more interesting discussion would be how reforming how the present system. Unlike K-12 education, post-secondary schooling is voluntary and paid for by students. Do we see evidence that colleges and universities are working to hold costs down in an effort to compete for students? Is the market for higher education working as predicted?
Do we see evidence that colleges and universities are working to hold costs down in an effort to compete for students?
Why would they in the presence of government subsidized loans?
Much of post-secondary education is not privately funded through tuition or endowments. Government student aid and research grants abound. Except for a tiny handful of colleges, all rely on the taxpayer for a significant amount of their revenue.
Tom,
The serious discussion isn’t about higher education. The serious discussion is about K-12 and the shitty system we now have for primary education.
“Do we see evidence that [K-12 schools] are working to hold costs down in an effort to compete for students?”
Since, even after controlling for inflation, the average cost per child in K-12 has quadrupled, I think we can safely say no.
“Is the market for [K-12] working as predicted?”
Since a significant percentage, particularly in inner cities, of public school students are functionally illiterate, I’d say no. How many graduates of public schools understand the graph of a line and how a line can be used to think about the real world? I’d say very few, since many are actually proud of how little math they know.
Regards,
Ken
“The serious discussion isn’t about higher education. The serious discussion is about K-12 and the shitty system we now have for primary education.”
DB’s post essentially described extending high school to fourteenth grade; it is meant as a critique of public K-12. The assumption is that something like our existing college system would exist for K-12 if the public school system did not exist, and, since our existing college system is better for higher education than our current K-12 system is for elementary education, we should extend the college system downward.
Seems like a reasonable question to ask. The answer is “no,” because an educated populace – universal literacy – is too important a national asset to be left to the short-term economic preferences of parents. On the other hand, extending mandatory education beyond high school has very little marginal utility to the commons.
The line between things we need each other to know – how to read English – and things we don’t – how to read Greek – has been drawn politically, and the former takes 12 years, on average, to teach. So, the question is not whether our college system does what it does better than our public schools do what they do; it’s where the line should be between mandatory and voluntary learning.
With the great charade being that ‘mandatory learning’ actually exists.
Nemoknada,
” universal literacy – is too important a national asset to be left to the short-term economic preferences of parents”
So much bullshit. This is the standard refrain I hear from statists: it’s too important to be left in the hands of people who it actually affects, rather than some faceless bureaucrat for whom bad decisions mean nothing.
The reality is that education is far too important to be left in the hands of politicians. You seem to think businesses think in the short term, but no one thinks in the short term more than politicians. People want to learn to read. Jesus, we have adult literacy programs BECAUSE PUBLIC EDUCATION FAILED!! Publicly run education doesn’t guarantee anything except corruption, cronyism, increasing insularity, and ultimately failure.
Food is far more important than education, yet compared to our educational markets, out food markets are incredibly free, yet no one is starving in this country due to lack of opportunity of earning enough for food. In fact, we have a super abundance of food. Compared to other countries where food was too important to be left to the market, there is NO DOUBT that markets are better at delivering products than government, including education.
“The line between things we need each other to know…has been drawn politically”
Yes, that’s what happens when government runs anything. It always becomes politicized. What do you expect? It’s also the primary problem. And yet another reason that public school systems should be eliminated. Now that the teacher union enjoys a monopoly and is staffed with primarily leftists, indoctrination occurs regularly. The corrupt left buses their students to protest rallies and everyone seems to be okay with that. WTF? I do not want my tax dollars funding leftists, yet because you and idiots like you have deemed education too important for markets I get to pay for the indoctrination of that bankrupt philosophy.
“it’s where the line should be between mandatory and voluntary learning.”
So your basic point is that people might learn the wrong things, like the fact that government fucks up nearly everything it touches, while free markets are vastly superior? Like the fact that nothing important should be left in the hands of politicians as they are sure to abuse the system, pay off their friends, and line their own pockets?
We have a crappy primary and secondary educational system resting on the feeble minds of people who think gov should be in charge of “important” things. Yet human history provides example after example of how badly gov does everything and really the gov should be in charge of as few things as possible.
Regards,
Ken
If you happen to be discussing problems of K-12 education with a supporter of that system, try asking this question and see if you still think it’s silly. This is a great question to have in your rhetorical quiver to get someone to stop and think.
As for your questions, Don’s question could lend some insight there too. I believe the college system has been adopting some of the characteristics of K-12 over the past couple of decades — mainly the considerable taxpayer support and a seemingly common set of academic standards. In my opinion, this has roughly commoditized the skills acquisition and left schools to be sorted primarily on their networking opportunities, storied names, sports departments and campus amenities.
Government significantly subsidizes both supply and demand, as well as acts as arbiter on behalf of the university ‘workers’ to the taxpayer shareholders.
In what reality is there any reason to believe post secondary education costs should decline?
It is virtually the same model of government’s current involvement in health care for the past couple generations, and exorbitant cost is identical in both cases.
I accuse you of asking a rhetorical question to which we all know the answer. Now to some of the patrons of the Cafe, knowing the right answer does not mean that they would accept it or act on it.
No need to name names.
Schools are structured to satisfy government planning needs for historical reasons. They often fail to achieve what they are ambitiously assigned. But they are expected to so as to allow kids to achieve as much as they can. Schools aren’t very good but can be much worse.
University is different. Universities also serve diverse functions in terms of academic needs. Some students are to be inculcated with needs of academia for further academic achievement. Others try to achieve professional standard. But unlike schools, set standards have to be met. I shudder to think of school kids with beer. And I despair thinking universities pass students who haven’t achieved standards. I think it a good thing neither are run like governments.
However, addressing the question, I feel it would be abysmal to run universities like schools. It would restrict achievement at the top end of candidates who weren’t in private. It would lower aspirations of mid level students. It would reinforce regional differences in standards (those poor people in ..). However the clincher, for mine, is it wouldn’t be cheaper, but would set a minimum level of expenditure.
Can we measure differences in quality between state-funded colleges and private colleges? Do private institutions offer a higher quality education than the state university?
I’ve attended both, and thought both were fairly equal on rigor and academic freedom. Not sure about major quality differences, though.
The purpose of schools isn’t to learn. Primary education is to provide daycare. College education is about credentialing.
The credentialing aspect would probably be damaged by the hypothetical approach Don poses.
Learning probably wouldn’t be changed much either way.
I disagree. One can learn a lot of things in hard-science classes like math, physics, chemistry.
Such an asinine question begs no intelligent answer. Better to spend time deciding to pick beans or slop the hogs.
On a slightly different note, the University of Minnesota has announced a 12 1/2% increase in tuition next year, to the outrage of students and their parents. However, when the university receives 35,000 applications for the 5,300 freshman openings it has each year, what’s to keep it from charging even more? Evidently, enough people place at least that much value on the education supplied, although chances are a lot of applications are just one of several to multiple schools made by an individual.
And, of the 5,000 openings, how many will have govt assistance in one way or another. Getting accreditation is a political ploy, too. I believe DR Sowell makes this abundantly clear as he points out university of Colorado, Boulder law school. Offering low tuitions and out performing the prominent ivy league schools meant Harvard was losing out to the competition and used the BAR to threaten UofC accreditation until they spent millions which added significantly to their costs which was passed on to students. The new tuition priced out low and moderate income students.
Yes, and when they charge more, idiots will be there to say, “See, education is getting too expensive for people to afford. We need more government subsidies.” Subsidies go up, giving reason for another price increase, and so on.
More interesting is the case for the opposite — the privatization of primary schooling (say, maybe grades 9-12)
Don, you obviously know your answer, but why not simply look to countries where university is essentially provided in the manner you suggest, and look at variety of measures of quality (such as their academic ratings?).
The other thing that makes school and university different is that the student at university are more mobile. Thus, they will simply relocate to the university they want, and will then be offered a tax payer funded place there. Students would be sorted by relocation and some of the cost premium for better universities would be captured by land and business owners in the area.
There are plenty of studies on this topic. Good universities attract good students, which makes the university results betters, which in turn continues the cycle. Bad universities do the same in reverse.
Yes, the market responds to government policy.
I also think that you often oversimplify the government funded v privately provided service debate in terms of cost cutting pressures. Government funded services operate in every country in the world and, I guess it may be a surprise to you, sometimes the costs of these services do fall over time. Maybe some governments have more intelligent people who value efficiency? Well, enough of them at least to put in place incentive mechanisms that reward efficiency that other public servants duly respond to.
“Don, you obviously know your answer, but why not simply look to countries where university is essentially provided in the manner you suggest, and look at variety of measures of quality (such as their academic ratings?).”
This is a very good point. Government universities in Poland (where my in-laws emigrated from) are far more prestigious than private universities, but a lot of that has to do with the way they structure admissions. In PL you are not guaranteed a university education, but the best performing high school students can get a taxpayer-paid stint at a top Government university like Warsaw Tech (it’s actually like a loan, you have to pay it back if you don’t graduate). I’m not saying this is the optimal model, but it is an interesting one nonetheless.
I propose the simple idea that all university education across the world is generally terrible, since so little of it is market driven.
Likewise we hold Finland as the best in public school education. I submit that any country that implemented a free market in education would quickly blow its doors off.
Private ownership just wastes resources. Government is always more efficient in everything it does because of the economies of scale. If the government ran all universities, they would be for the good of the people instead of the bottom line for the wealthy elite, and everyone would be able to get an education for free.
The only reason public schools are failing in some neighborhoods is because of racist teachers and underfunding, and private universities keep the poor and working class in their place, and only allow the wealthy to have higher educations. Thank goodness for government loan programs and affermative action; without those, we’d all be slaves to the corporations.
And people say it’s tough to spot sarcasm in the written word.
If a free market existed in education, I think that the present 3 tiered system would not have come into existence. The market “probably” would have created many varied educational options.
Dennis,
This is a great point. In fact, what likely would have occured, would have been education/business partnerships that would have been established to provide specialized training for the “preverbial” jobs of the future.
(A lot of silly comments on this post.)
Don is talking to a 14 year old, who has asked him to post a question on his father’s web site, so that an opinion other than his father’s is available to him.
Private ownership just wastes resources. Government is always more efficient in everything it does because of the economies of scale.
The concepts of “wasting resources”, “efficiency,” and “economies of scale,” only have clear meanings within the private economic sphere of action.
If the government ran all universities, they would be for the good of the people instead of the bottom line for the wealthy elite, and everyone would be able to get an education for free.
Hear, hear! Likewise, if government ran the entire bread-making industry — from cultivating wheat, to milling flour, to baking bread, to distributing the final product — it would be “for the good of the people” instead of “the bottom line for the wealthy elite,” and everyone would be able — would, in fact, be entitled — to as much free bread as he wanted. That much is obvious.
By way of example, observe the smashing success obtained by a centrally planned economy like that of the former Soviet Union, where wheat, flour, and bread were so plentiful that the Kremlin had to give away its surplus to poor countries like the U.S. Observe, too, the famous success at creating plenty and ending the infamous “scarcity economics” of pre-central-planning days, in the highly efficient economies of Cuba and North Korea. Finally, by way of a sobering contrast, reflect on the shocking lack of bread in the U.S., where only the richest capitalist exploiters among us (and there are more and more every year, it seems) can afford to buy bread; for as you said above, “Private ownership just wastes resources.” For shame!
Unending thanks for your insightful post. Looking forward to more.
I hitch hiked through South America with a university friend who had become a socialist.
In Peru, there is still less land under cultivation than in the time of the Incas. Further, the rubble of their greatest cities and buildings only remain because the people could not figure out how to move the huge stones!
My friend saw Peru as a victim of oppression. I saw it as a country without property rights. My question to him was simple; if the government helped oppress the people, how is an even larger one going to help them?
In the end, bureaucracy always comes down to the Superman argument. Just as it does in corporate America, where it is just as faulty.
You are wrong. I hope for Don’s sake you didn’t take economics or history at George Mason University. Government ownership has meant poverty, sickness, disease, wasted lives and suffering for millions of people for at least the last 200 years. Private ownership has meant improving living standards, better health and more meaningful lives precisely because it’s better utilizes scarce resources. One example not listed in a post below is China where ownership and control by the government starved as many as 20 million people between 1958 and 1972. People were reduced to eating leaves before the they died of starvation. Who ever gave you that poppycock concerning government efficiency should receive a good dose
of corporal punishment. Government is indeed necessary, just less of it focused on it’s correct mission should be what you are learning to articulate.
Sorry meant for our bright university student
I don’t want my (property) tax dollars to fund some kid’s education who would spit on me if I were starving in the street. Let Justin Bieber pay for the little brats education. I need my money to pay for my own expenses. Government is out of control. I pay about $3,000/year in property taxes, and another $1,200 for sewer and water. Why is government killing me to give a stranger’s child health care and free education. My neighbor, who is undereducated and jobless, has a young child and his girlfriend is expecting. And I’m going to be paying for his kids upbringing. Gross. Make abortion safe, legal, and mandatory.
I mention multi-millionaire child, Justin Bieber, because the kids or their seem to find money to spend on his awful CDs and on cigarettes, beer, etc. They have money for what they want to buy, just not health care and education. I’d like to take a cultural trip to Italy to visit museums and other places of historical importance. Unfortunately, I have no money to do those things because the government steals from poor people to bail out banks and Wall St. speculators. Gross and intolerable, really.
*their parents …
I would assume a similar result would occur to how American high schools are now, with mediocre being the norm, some public schools in affluent areas being better than average, with a few high performing private and magnet schools. I would also assume another tier of education would rise in prominence, where “going to college” would mean “getting your master’s degree” as another level of selecting the elite, since bachelor’s degrees would become ubiquitous.
Two good books out right now, that I heard on Medved and Hewitt’s talk-show.
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower. Speaks to the unqualified nature of today’s high school graduate, and discusses the funnel to college, and the duplicity of businesses, to demand degrees for jobs otherwise not requiring that level of education.
http://www.amazon.com/Basement-Ivory-Tower-Confessions-Accidental/dp/067002256X
and
The Faculty Lounges: And other reasons you won’t get the college education you pay for.
http://www.amazon.com/Faculty-Lounges-Reasons-College-Education/dp/1566638860
Is this a joke. Compare the school cafeteria with a private resturant. Which has more choices; better food? Why would any sane individual want to attend a government educational system that is universal. Will this improve education?
Look at other government monopolies and ask yourself do we need another AMTRAK?
Overall secondary education quality would probably decrease, due to a fairly dramatic decrease in the quality of the best schools, although perhaps there would be a significant increase for the worst students who otherwise would receive no schooling.
Perhaps that is why public secondary education is not set up in the way you imagine in this post. Empirically, using the system we have now, we observe that public colleges do about the same as private colleges in terms of educating people, controlling for GPAs and standardized test scores of the students going in. The price is about the same too, although who is paying it differs somewhat between the two. In my opinion, whether the government, at any level, should be subsidizing or administering any part of secondary education is more a policy and societal question than it is an efficiency or structural question.
“Would this arrangement work? Would it improve the quality of post-secondary education in America?”
ROTFL
Higher education in the USA is heading for a crash. Despite packed lecture halls, technological advances such as virtual classrooms, and widespread availability of broadband internet, higher education costs per student do not go down. Where is the money going? To administrators (administrator to student ratios keep falling and administrators have gotten huge pay increases), college sports, advertising, and glitz. Ironically, the ratio of full time professors to students has gone up markedly in the past 15 years. More and more students are being taught by part-time, poorly paid instructors. Schools accept students who are not capable of college-level work and who would not have been accepted a generation ago. Schools dumb-down their classes and offer college credits for remedial reading and remedial algebra. When businesses start realizing how little most BA degrees are worth, the positive “signaling” provided by a BA will disappear. At that point the higher education boom will collapse.
Government takeover of higher education would accelerate its demise. That would be a good thing, but only if higher education could recover without remaining a government dependency. Since governments rarely cede authority and power, there is no benefit from a government takeover.
I would like to implant a new idea: In elementary school, I just rehashed the same ideas for six years. If elementary school was privatized, I would have graduated collage in grade 14.
Extend the mandatory juvenile penal system to grade 14? You mean, American children haven’t yet been sufficiently conditioned to accept forced servitude?
I lived in Spain in the ’70′s and ’80′s. This all may have changed since Spain entered the EU, but back then, at least, prospective new university students were indeed assigned to the nearest provincial university site, and the education was free. The “catch” was that within each university site, each individual department had a predetermined, limited number of “seats” available for incoming freshmen. These seats were awarded to the highest scorers of that department’s very competitive entrance exam (the “PAU”). I don’t remember how many different departmental exams each student could sit for per year (i.e. how many different departments one student could try out for), so I’m not sure whether if a student was denied entry into the Law Department, say, he could then compete for a place in the Engineering Department, or, if, were he unsuccessful in earning a seat in his first choice of department this year, well, there was always next year. What I do know is that you didn’t just enter the school and later declare a major, or change your major. Majors (or at least departments) were decided before entering, and acceptance into that department was determined by one’s score on that department’s PAU vs. the number of seats available.
You have precisely described the state of the free public school in France. Except if you choose a costly private school, your children are assigned to the nearby school until the final exam (BAC).
Having children in both private and public schools, I can say that both are functionally equivalent in term of level of education, though professors in private schools tend to overrate children’s notes.
One of the advantage of the private schools is that if a professor is not up to the level required by the school, he is replaced in the year. One of the advantage of the public sector is that public schools have much more money to educate.
All in all, I don’t think there is much difference between the two systems for the future of the children ; the choice is more of a personal convenience.