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Economist Debates: The cost of higher education Education of New Zealand, France and South Africa, the European Commission and the Bar Council. The proposition’s opening statement October 29th 2008 Individuals should certainly pay for their higher education. Anything else is deeply unfair to their fellow citizens. For the children of the middle classes, attending university has become a birthright. And a birthright that really pays. The economic returns to a degree are large and lifelong; graduates, everywhere, earn more than non-graduates. Meanwhile social mobility—indeed, any chance of getting a good job—is ever more dependent on having a degree. Forget making it up from the shop-floor. Without higher education, doors everywhere slam in your face. Universities have expanded rapidly everywhere, but the beneficiaries have been overwhelmingly middle-class. It is not poor clever children who have been flooding into higher education, but the children of the affluent, whether clever or not. Yet bizarrely, in much of the world, governments seem determined that to those who have it shall be given. How else to explain the enormous proportions of public education spending that are directed into higher education? Huge differences exist in the quality of schools, with the poor as the consistent losers. Developed countries are struggling, 10
Economist Debates: The cost of higher education with little success, to narrow the income gap between their most and least advantaged citizens. In that situation, should ordinary people also be paying, through their taxes, for the university education of the affluent young? Because that is what is actually involved when we say that the state should pay for higher education. A university education is of enormous and direct benefit to the individual. A major reason for its value is that only some people have it. So the individual, and not the taxpayer, should pay for it. There are important and pressing calls on the resources of the government. Using taxpayers’ money to help a sub-set of young people to earn high incomes in the future is not one of them. Full government funding is not even very good for universities. On the contrary, it can be the kiss of death. If students have to pay for their education, they not only work harder, but also demand more from their teachers. And their teachers have to keep them satisfied. If that means taking teaching seriously, and giving less time to their own research interests, that is surely something to celebrate. Adam Smith worked in a Scottish university whose teachers lived off student fees. He also knew and despised 18thcentury Oxford, where the academics lived comfortably off endowment income in an intellectual backwater. Guaranteed salaries, Smith argued, were the enemy of diligence; and when the academics were lazy and incompetent, the students were similarly lackadaisical. In Scotland, with its fee-paying students and non-endowed staff, things were quite different. “Where the masters really perform their duty, there are no examples, I believe, that the greater part of the students ever neglect theirs,” he argued. Scotland then, unlike now, 11
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