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Economist Debates: The cost of higher education
than the rest of the world, because it offered it sooner. It is
able to support a mass system which also provides high
quality because, and only because, it accepts individual
contributions as normal and right. Nor is it alone. Other
countries, including England, Australia, Japan and New
Zealand, operate university systems to which individuals’
fees make a major contribution. They do so in large part
because they cannot see any other way to maintain quality in
the education they offer.
This does not mean that individuals have always to pay the
entire cost of their higher education. It certainly does not
mean that they have to pay it all in full, upfront, from their
own pockets, as soon as they start to study. On the contrary.
That is not the practice of the United States nor, indeed, of
my own fee-paying country, England. (Scotland, please note,
is different.)
My opponent offers something of a caricature of American
higher education. This is the home, after all, of the University
of California, the most hugely admired of public university
systems. Texas, butt of so many European sneers, is
enormously generous to its state university. Overall, America
spends a very large amount of public money on higher
education (as, by the way, it does on health). But it
combines this with major contributions from individuals,
which they pay because what they are buying—higher
education—is worth a great deal to them, individually.
Professor Flodström invokes national solidarity, and the
importance of being a citizen; of contributing to your society,
and knowing that your fellow-citizens will correspondingly
feel a duty to you. So being educated means that you can
give more, as well as gain more; and in return, your fellows
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