Our op-ed on college prices and Obama’s recent proposals for diminishing the pain they cause appeared this week in the Chicago Tribune.
One important aim we had in writing this piece was to help readers see these recent proposals in the context of the larger dilemma confronting the finance of public higher education in the United States—the disjuncture between Americans’ great reluctance to pay taxes and their equally great eagerness to benefit from public subsidies. In fact, higher-education finance is just one instance of this very widespread phenomenon in modern America. This point is well-illustrated in a recent piece in the New York Times showing how some people who, while quite adamant about wanting to shrink federal spending, are heavily dependent on federal programs to keep themselves going.
It’s all very reminiscent of the 2008 voter who wanted to “keep the government’s hands off my Medicare.”
It’s hard to imagine any politician with even a minimal survival instinct confronting this fundamental problem head on in an election year. And since in America elections come up quite a lot, there’s no telling when this underlying issue will get the thoughtful attention it deserves—if ever.
In the particular context of prices and costs in public higher education, we summed up our view of the problem this way:
“Students and families don’t want education to be shoddy, but they do want it to be cheap. And the universities have not shown the creative spirit and ingenuity that might allow them to discover more cost-effective ways to deliver what students need.
“The financing system for public higher education is fundamentally broken. Students and families want good education but they don’t want to pay for it. State and local governments are starving for revenue and besieged by demanding constituencies. The federal government faces big fiscal deficits that can’t responsibly be addressed until the economic recovery is stronger, but which can’t be sustained in the long run. And the universities continue to be more reactive than proactive in dealing with the fiscal pressures.
“Obama’s recent proposals might be said at least to do no harm, and in some areas they might even do some good. But until Americans find a way to resolve their contradictory desire for high-quality education that they don’t have to pay for, either through tuition or taxes, this struggle will continue.”
