Colleges are not car agents: the case of privatization of higher education
Iman’s article among conservatives has always been that the private sector, through competition and discipline in the market, provides better, cheapest and more efficient products than the government. In the second Trump administration, this neoliberal economic and political philosophy is Lodestar.
Project 2025, a plan designed for management by the Heritage Corporation, recommends a plan to plan for the MEDICATE company for virtual option. Other candidates include social security privatization, national weather service, Fanny and Faridy Mac, air traffic control, old warriors affairs, US transportation and American postal service.
Why not add colleges and universities to the list? A new book tries to present this issue – but it does not succeed.
In “Let Colleges Fisr: Creative Destruction Power in Higher Education”, Richard K. Vider that “American universities dominate the ranks of the greatest universities of the planet”, but insist that the principles of free market must govern higher education. Vedder is an honorary professor of economics at Ohio University and his first colleague at the independent institute, the non -profit organization that published his book.
Vedder is an example of how the absolute is the wrong and dangerous for the free market.
Vader argues that the private sector is flourishing through the operation that the economist Joseph Shumpeter called “creative destruction”. Companies that do not adapt to “changing tastes, new technology, or changing the prices of productive inputs” fail, allowing the markets “to re -allocate resources from unproductive uses to productivity.” However, higher education institutions are rarely failing due to government rescue operations and private charitable work, which hinders “resource movement towards new ideas, colleges and universities that they adopt.”
Vedder believes that “an increasing number of young people” say only not “the college” because they believe it is not worth the cost. The reality is much more complicated, and it is a product of demographic transformations and labor market conditions, as well as changing value perceptions. This year, joining in the first year of 5.5 percent, and over the total enrollment in the level of prenatal levels.
Vedder is true that the public’s confidence in higher education has decreased sharply over the past decade. But you have confidence in national institutions in general, with a significant increase in much better than large companies and large technology companies, although market discipline.
Vedder recognizes, but only once, “in the private sector, there is a profitable extract that is not present in higher education.” Then he ignores this deep difference.
And he affirms that the issue of government financing for education is “problematic”, and provides recommendations for colleges and universities based on very high claims on the virtues of the private institution.
Vedder appears to believe that “the slavery available in the seventeenth and eighteenth century was a quagmire solution to the main financing problem.” And it maintains, without mentioning the predatory practices that led to the crisis of loans and the great stagnation, that competitive markets “maintain the most wise and profitable banks in the queue.”
Vedder suggests that students who excel academically should pay less than those who do it badly, and that those who get degrees in specializations that pay less than what high school graduates earn should not receive large financial aid packages. It appears to support the employment of students instead of trade union workers for grass and paint buildings. Vedder attributes the administrative “bloating” in an important part to the increases in the diversity and employees of the stock and inclusion, but it ignores the expenses of mental health, fitness centers and luxury housing, and the changes made at the request of customers (i.e. students and parents).
Why, Vader asks, “They are distinguished universities [tax exempt] Unfortunate situation for other useful service providers such as used car dealers or fast food restaurants? “Leaves readers wondering whether it also calls for removing a tax exemption from churches, hospitals, institutions and many other non -profit organizations, from the American Cancer Society and watching Human Rights Watch to his independent institute.
Although Vedder admits that higher education may have “positive external factors”, for example, by raising living levels, it stresses what it sees as negative external factors, such as “decrease in objectivity” in the press and the incomplete employment of graduates “with great wake up such as sexual studies.” Universities aimed at profit find “more in line with American traditions regarding the production of goods and services”, despite their history of predatory recruitment tactics, high costs and weak students ’results.
Vedder admits some innovation and diversity in higher education, pointing to new universities, zero schools, religious institutions, online certificates programs and open online training courses. If these innovations are not widely arrested, one may conclude that the market may occur.
Instead, Vedder concludes that government support for higher education is a great obstacle to innovation and that “American universities in the long run will benefit from the federal government that prevents its involvement.” Whatever it does not consider seriously the catastrophic impact that will end the federal support for university research on scientific, technological and economic success in America, or how to end the federal students ’loans that limit the access of poor students to higher education.
Many of the repair proposals in Vedder, such as the use of external sources of non -educational activities from food services to information technology and finding ways to use campus buildings throughout the year, are already present in many universities or have been tried. Others, such as the use of income sharing agreements to finance student education, call for more study. Some, like his support for the proposal of Adam Smith, “the huge perception” that students should pay directly, should not be taken seriously.
In the end, Vedder admits that “universities are the worst forms of providing advanced education for citizens – with the exception of all others.” On this, at least, we can agree.
Glen Cltcholler is a professor of American studies at Thomas and Dorothy Lituin. David Webman is an honorary head at Hamilton College.
