And isn't the higher education market in the u.s. open to competition from for-profit universities ? isn't the problem that for profit universities have a bad reputation vs non-profits so employees prefer people who went to non-profit universities ?
If the product educates students just as well, and at a better price point, why would the cuts be "draconian"?
I would deem it intelligent business and a better use of government resources.
If you can replace one crappy American programmer with an excellent programmer from Wakanda for less money, that's just good business and I've never seen a good argument against that.
However, every programmer has heard the horror tales of companies firing their best (and highest paid) programmers. These programmers were not replaced with equally skilled Wakandans for less pay, but rather the cheapest code monkeys that Latveria has to offer. It saves a bunch of money this quarter, but causes problems in the long run because you didn't want to pay for quality.
In the same way, I'm suspicious of some of the motives here. I don't doubt for a second that software instructors can improve the learning process. I'm working on my own platform to help my students with some of their math anxiety. This is a good idea and is the path forward.
However, imagine a university with three stats lecturers. The first two have twenty years of teaching experience and are well liked by their students. The third one was just hired in as a temp to cover the excess course load and mumbles through her lectures. With the new software, the administration should get rid of the mumbling temp and now let all the students benefit from the good professors' lectures. On the other hand, the university can save $40k by firing one good lecturer and keeping the mumbler. As a final option, the university could fire both of the experienced lecturers, have an overloaded mumbler give a course that's even worse than the one she was doing before, and save $160k. I'd argue that the first option was progress, the second poor planning, and that the third set was draconian. I also believe that the third choice is exactly the one that the administration will make. That's why I'm nervous about this software.
How well do you think American society and institutions were doing during the hay day of not-for-profit education versus how well do you think it's doing now? Does your criteria include providing for all citizens and having a robust public debate?
It seems more likely to me that the marketizing measures of today have done a lot to break the community building aspect of higher education but that for-profit education hardly promises anything better. Suuure, blame the government for the scams that constitute for-profit institutions now but without the student loan scheme, they wouldn't exist at all.
Could you be more specific about what periods you are referring to? Personally, I would characterize now as the hay day of not-for-profit education - we have far more of it than ever before.
Suuure, blame the government...
Huh? I was blaming principal-agent problems in nonprofits, and suggesting they are less of an issue in for-profits (though it is still an issue even there). What does this have to do with the government?
Broken it may be, but I certainly prefer free and inefficient education to the alternative.
Why not? How does your normative point (that education should be free) relate to the positive point (that education isn't currently competitive) at all?
Also, I'm curious which service you believe should be free? Education, evaluation or credentialing?
Specifically, suppose we create a marketplace of for-profit education sellers as you suggest, and that marketplace creates good-enough-cheap-enough* slots for 80% of eligible students. What happens to the remaining 20% of students? In an ordinary marketplace, that demand would go unfilled, creating an incentive for more good-enough-cheap-enough slots to be created (up to some equilibrium, not necessarily enough for everyone). But we can't let "demand" go unfilled in this case (i.e., throw smart poor kids under the bus). So does the government fulfill its guarantee by favoring unacceptable sellers, either paying extra or lowering its standards -- giving sellers who charged less an incentive to raise their prices or provide a worse service? Or does it fulfill the guarantee by re-creating public universities, abandoning the goal of a for-profit marketplace?
These aren't rhetorical questions -- we're currently using both strategies, and more. It's not an unsolvable problem, but it's not a trivial one.
(Check out the Commonwealth Health Connector to see how Massachusetts is solving the same problem in health care, combining for-profit providers with a universal guarantee. They're not doing a bad job, but it sure ain't a conventional free market.)
* And then there's the question of what's good enough and cheap enough, when it's a democratic/lobbying process setting standards -- that's pretty different from an ordinary marketplace between lots of buyers and sellers.
Ultimately I believe the problem with what you propose is the idea that the government can guarantee that every buyer will find a seller at a (marginal to the seller) cost below X. This is just an attempt to pass a law against scarcity, which can't really work. All you can do with law is create different rationing mechanisms - perhaps replacing price with queues or favoritism.
Incidentally, even ignoring all government intervention, college education is not a conventional free market. Inefficiencies abound, most notably the prevalence of huge numbers of non-profit seeking agents and reputation effects.
For all those who like to discuss market failures, this is the place to find them.
Anyway: when pantaloons said "you can't have a competitive market for what should (ostensibly) be a free and universal service", they were making a normative claim that universal education is desirable, but a positive claim about how to achieve it: that "universal" and "competitive" are mutually exclusive qualities of any marketplace. That's the argument I was expanding on. I claim that it is very difficult to structure a competitive marketplace while also ensuring that everyone who needs some can get some. Thus if the goal is universal access to a good, affordable college education, your free market proposal is an incomplete strategy.
You seem to be saying that government cannot ensure that everyone has access to a good, affordable college education ("the government can['t] guarantee that every buyer will find a seller"). That's a position I think might be hard to support. The government absolutely can pass a law that prevents scarcity -- which is to say, ensure that citizens have access to something the free market doesn't make enough of. It can, for example, provide universal access to high school. It can provide universal access to assault rifles for healthy young men during a war. It can provide universal access to school lunch. It can provide universal access to health care for people over 65. It could, if it chose to make that a priority, provide universal access to college education for those who need it.
If you propose that "non-profit education is broken," and that the solution is for-profit education, then you need to either explain how for-profit education can provide universal access, or explain why universal access shouldn't be a goal.
The government absolutely can pass a law that prevents scarcity...
To some extent, yes. The government can redirect resources from other uses towards some fixed use. But the extent to which this is done is still fundamentally limited. For example, you can't significantly increase the amount of medical services provided for at least 7-8 years, which is the amount of time it takes to train a doctor. (You might, however, redistribute medical services from some people to others.)
Although I generally believe the burden of proof is on the people arguing in favor of taking action (e.g., ensuring "universal access"), I'll link to a post where I argue we should tax education rather than subsidize it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2454363
I didn't indicate that I think any should be free. I think education should be universally accessible.
This is a perfect illustration of why non-profit education is broken. There is no principal, so the agents are running the show. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem if you are unfamiliar.)
In a competitive market dominated by for-profit principals, this wouldn't be an issue. The effective principals would order their agents to cut costs and they would, allowing these principals to dominate the market by cutting costs.