Should College Attendance be Subsidized?

I’m in with Bryan on this one for a variety of reasons.
If you want it you will get it. If we subsidize it it loses its value so why bother working hard?
Education can be an important stepping stone in life and those who choose to pursue an educational base for their life’s toolbox will probably do better than those who do not.
Subsidies typically devalue the thing being subsidized and can’t be considered useful to a valuable education as a generality.

I’m not sure that college should not be … taxed. Sure college may reduce the amount of criminals – but it might create better criminals too. Sure, college might make you a better informed voter – but that is a negative externality as far as I am concerned. And given what is being taught at much of the colleges in the U.S. – it would seem to me that much of it offends near half the population.

I’d separate the discussion of imperfect capital markets from the externalities from higher education attainment. I am not sure the net social external effects are positive.

Colleges have become nothing but trade schools and serve two purposes. 1) A college degree cuts down on the competition for jobs in law, medicine, accounting, real estate, journalism, etc., so that those who can get through college can earn higher salaries. 2) It saves companies the expense of basic training for engineers and other professions that used to be learned in an apprenticeship. Because we allow state licensing of professionals, we pay far more for education than we would in a free market. That means we have less money to spend on really important things, like football tickets. And as Adam Smith wrote, state licensing provides cover for charlatans.

It’s worse than that.

College churns out people who are a negative drain on wealth production and happiness and a healthy society — e.g. lobbyists, lawyers, English professors, undergraduate drunks, leftist school teachers, bad poets, socially delayed permanent adolecents, unreadable novelists, unhappy grad students, PC script writers, idiotic social critics, leftist journalists, Congressional aids, etc.

For a parallel think of the socially pathological output unintentionally produced by the “reform schools” — e.g. teaching children who’ve done something wrong how to
be professional criminals or true sociopaths.

L

I would like to link this post to the earlier one on the fall of the Berlin Wall, because it seems to me that there is a certain degree of socialism in Arnold’s comment about college.

Compare this (from Richter)
“Whatever the individual man may be, the Community has made him what he is.”

to this (from Kling)
Selfishly speaking, it works, but from a social point of view, we shouldn’t encourage it.

It seems to me that in both cases the interests of the Whole are being placed above the interests of the individual. My view is reinforced by Ransom’s comments about “negative drain on wealth production” which implies that every citizen’s positive duty is to contribute to the wealth of the Whole.

This looks to me like socialism via conformist pressure rather then Richter’s socialism by force. In both systems, the individual is valued only to the degree that they contribute to some greater good.

Thomas,

I’m not sure Kling’s quote should be taken to mean that education is everywhere and always beneficial to the individual, and always a detriment or cost to society. I think his view is more nuanced, in that certain individuals absolutely benefit themselves and society by being educated, but most would not. The net effect of promoting education is negative because it ends up costing individuals more than it benefits on the whole.

In other words, I think he is aggregating and not invoking some nebulous conception of society. I took Greg’s post as more of a facetious rant.

Justin,

I think there is some merit to the signaling assumption, but I’m more inclined to think it signals an acceptance of norms and compliance to expectations (which are also beneficial to a company, as renegade workers can be very problematic).

The problem is, when these norms becomes normal (see some of the bar graphs posted here about education percentages) that signal becomes dilluted.

One thing about signaling is that it’s not just signaling that you are competent enough, you are signaling that you are more competent than everyone else. Hence Bryan’s use of the concert metaphor.

I don’t agree with that metaphor. We are not in a zero sum game in terms of the number of quality workers. (1) developing the signal makes it easier to create a signaling equilibrium. (2) creating an educational arms race helps establish social norms of self-discipline and deferred gratification. We end out with more disciplined and quality workers. It is win/win.

Too many defenders of subsidizing college education ignore the difference between the average college or college grad and the marginal school or student.

Are we really saying that the typical person who isn’t able to make it to community college and then transfer to some four year college today should be subsidized? Do we really think that most of those who drop out of college should be subsidized till they finish college?

You don’t have to fully agree with Caplan to appreciate that a large fraction of graduates of the typical four year college learn little of value or learn it inefficiently (We’re not talking UCLA or Swarthmore here. Even GMU is well above the mean). My guess is that the typical graduate with a non-technical degree would learn just as much from a focused one year program that stressed writing skills, analytic reading, remedial algebra, and some basic computer usage. Guess what, the better high school grads already have those skills. And anyone who can’t acquire those skills after high school in one year, shouldn’t go to college at all unless they pay for it themselves.

GU: “We are never going to have competent human-provided medical care or legal services for $20/hour.”

Nurse practitioners are doing it, in many cases better than MD’s. I can’t tell you how hard the work in law or medicine is, but in my experience I haven’t found doctors or lawyers to be particularly bright people, especially lawyers. The President is a prime example. They tend to have good memories so they can regurgitate well, but lack basic reasoning skills. BTW, research has shown that computer programs do a much better job of diagnosing diseases than do doctors.

I am in favor of letting nurse practitioners do simple things like draw blood. But there are some problems that, at least in the near future, must be dealt with by highly skilled human beings.

I know more about law, so I will give an example from that field. You will not be able to (in the near future, and maybe never) type into a computer program your legal problem and have it litigate a case for you (or negotiate a complicated merger transaction).

Are there ways to make legal services cheaper? Sure, have paralegals do non-difficult administrative and research tasks for example. Pre-made legal forms for routine contracts is another example. But complex legal problems require real, live, skilled lawyers, and to make it worth their while to go through all the trouble of representing you, you have to pay them. You get what you pay for in many instances in life; it is disheartening that there is no magic fix, but there is little to be done about it at the moment.

That’s why I say, focus on easy fixes or things that matter much more. On the list of evils in the world, gov’t. licensing of doctors and lawyers must be pretty darn low on the list.

ps Obama is not lacking in reasoning skills. Like most politicians, he is an amoral power-monger and he has already proven to be extremely effective at increasing the size and scope of government.

“‘A plumber with a college education is a better plumber and a better citizen than one who doesn’t, all other things being equal.’

I don’t see how you would go about demonstrating any of that.”

Ryan,

I don’t have any proof that it’s true–I’m just hypothesizing–but it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to investigate. If we acknowledge that plumbing involves more than just knowing what pipe goes where, and that better plumbers likely have better customer relations, are more likely to supervise other workers, are more likely to make higher incomes, etc., it wouldn’t be difficult to test the outcomes of college-educated plumbers versus those who are not. In terms of citizenship, you can bet that college-educated plumbers are more likely to be involved in their communities and take leadership roles. With a large enough sample size, it would be straightforward to adjust for things like IQ, family background, place of business, etc.