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<strong>Economist</strong> Debates: <strong>The</strong> cost of higher education<br />
with little success, to narrow the income gap between their<br />
most and le<strong>as</strong>t advantaged citizens. In that situation, should<br />
ordinary people also be paying, through their taxes, for the<br />
university education of the affluent young? Because that is<br />
what is actually involved when we say that the state should<br />
pay for higher education.<br />
A university education is of enormous and direct benefit to<br />
the individual. A major re<strong>as</strong>on for its value is that only some<br />
people have it. So the individual, and not the taxpayer,<br />
should pay for it. <strong>The</strong>re are important and pressing calls on<br />
the resources of the government. Using taxpayers’ money to<br />
help a sub-set of young people to earn high incomes in the<br />
future is not one of them.<br />
Full government funding is not even very good for<br />
universities. On the contrary, it can be the kiss of death. If<br />
students have to pay for their education, they not only work<br />
harder, but also demand more from their teachers. And their<br />
teachers have to keep them satisfied. If that means taking<br />
teaching seriously, and giving less time to their own research<br />
interests, that is surely something to celebrate.<br />
Adam Smith worked in a Scottish university whose teachers<br />
lived off student fees. He also knew and despised 18thcentury<br />
Oxford, where the academics lived comfortably off<br />
endowment income in an intellectual backwater. Guaranteed<br />
salaries, Smith argued, were the enemy of diligence; and<br />
when the academics were lazy and incompetent, the students<br />
were similarly lackadaisical. In Scotland, with its fee-paying<br />
students and non-endowed staff, things were quite different.<br />
“Where the m<strong>as</strong>ters really perform their duty, there are no<br />
examples, I believe, that the greater part of the students<br />
ever neglect theirs,” he argued. Scotland then, unlike now,<br />
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