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A still bigger problem with the lack of explicit tuition fees is that those who attend institutions of higher education have high lifetime wealth relative to the rest of their society. Truck drivers' taxes should not be going to pay for the training--or even the enlightenment--of future lawyers...
Brad DeLong
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I agree that one of the problems of American colleges is a lack of feedback between the quality of the education and the funding of the school. I went to a third-rate liberal arts college in the midwest, at a cost of $11,000/yr and I did not get a high quality education there.
It would be nice to find a way to tax industries in proportion to their dependency on the products of higher education, but I can't think of a way to do it.
One approach I've heard discussed is a little like the PAYE system in Australia. You can choose to pay cash for your education (if you have it or you can get loans for it) or you can agree to have a percentage of your income, for a fixed number of years after you graduate, turned over to your college. This would very heavily favour colleges and programmes that lead to high incomes.
Now, the case can be made that there are programmes that need to be funded that don't lead to high incomes. Science, for example, doesn't often lead to wealth. Some more direct subsidy is probably necessary.
I suspect it wouldn't work by itself as a solution to responsible higher education, but it would really be nice to see some of the mediocre colleges try to justify their tuition costs in light of the quality of their education.
Alan Greenspun (an MIT prof at http://photo.net) proposes that MIT become tuition free, since most students are funded out of MIT's sizeable endowment anyway. Making elite universities free for students wouldn't be a bad deal either, so long as admission was based the ability to pass a difficult entrance exam or some other criteria that doesn't discriminate against poor students more than necessary. Those schools are already subsidised by businesses and governments directly.
As a fairly recent product of the American school system, I can tell you that the average American university isn't worth $11,000/yr, but considering how much harder it is to get a good job without some kind of undergrad degree, kids today mostly don't have a choice. America still has first rate elite schools, as good or better than those of other countries, but only a tiny handful are able to get in.
There has been an explosion of university administration staff in the last 20 years, and a lot of people claim that this is the cause of rapid increases in tuition. Does anybody have any idea why administration is so much larger?
Scott Martens
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