Higher Education From 50,000 Feet

He’s talking about the United Kingdom, but John Quiggin’s effort to engage the UK tuition debate by starting again from first principles, is relevant to the United States as well. That’s because here, too, we have policy debates that pivot around a status quo that’s radically inegalitarian in a way that tends to confuse discussion:

My starting point is that, in a modern society and economy, nearly everyone needs to finish high school and the great majority need further education (academic, professional/technical or vocational) beyond that, if they are to thrive and prosper. So, rather than thinking about universities as the destination of a select few, and then about various second-best alternatives for others, we should be starting from the view of post-secondary education as a universal service like school education or health services. That does not mean that everyone should get the same post-secondary education (any more than everyone should get the same health services), but it does mean a presumption that everyone should have access to educational resources of similar quality.

That’s radically different from a system where historically-determined differences in endowments and funding drive massive inequality in resources which in turn produce and perpetuate inequality in outcomes. This inequality is most evident in the dominance of Oxford and Cambridge graduates among the elite, but it is replicated all the way down the higher education hierarchy.

The higher education funding landscape in the United States is very complicated due to the mix of “private” and “public” institutions, the large quantity of public funds that are appropriated to private institutions, the large quantity of private funds that are raised by public institutions, and the way the tax code provides a public subsidy for private donations. However, the same basic structural issue exists. The institutions that are most exclusionary in their admissions policies are the ones that have the most resources. And this inequity replicates itself throughout the hierarchy. Within any given state’s state university system, the tendency is for the more exclusive institutions to have higher budgets. Community colleges are worse-funded than selective ones.

All this defies logic.

I can think of two broad principles that would be more defensible than funding by exclusivity. One would be funding by need. This would say that teenagers whose parents have modest incomes need resources more than do teenagers whose parents have high incomes. So institutions that attract a disproportionately high income client base should attract little support from the public. That means reduced direct appropriations, and at a minimum social pressure on civil society actors not to donate to highly privileged institutions. Another would be funding by quality. Here you would say that resources ought to flow to institutions with a proven track-record of producing unusually large student learning gains. In our current system, I think that funding quality is what we think we’re doing. Yale is “better” than the University of Connecticut so funds flow to it. But in our current setup, better simply means more exclusive. It’s a measure of the quality of the inputs, not the quality of the instruction. The result is that both the public sector and the civic sphere are essentially acting to redistribute wealth and opportunities upwards.