UC Students Propose Alternative To Tuition Increases : NPR

A student prepares to speak in opposition to proposed tuition increases at a University of California Board of Regents meeting in July 2011.

UC Students Propose Alternative To Tuition Increases : NPR

Students from my Chicago School and Contemporary Political Economy seminars will recognize the proposal advanced by Fix UC as that once proposed by Nobel Prize winning Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The idea is that, if education is an investment, whose investment is it? It is the student’s investment, some say. Others that it is the investment of some future employer. And still others say, no, it is the investment of the student’s family or of society at large.

The question is: who benefits from the student’s education? And once we state the question in this way, then we can see why there may be so many stakeholders laying claim to any one student’s education.

Before automatically assuming that Friedman would deny any public interest in education, we need first to acknowledge that Friedman viewed basic education as a public good because, in his view, it prepared future citizens to make basic choices. Friedman therefore viewed basic literacy in the fundamentals as an essential right for every citizen and an essential obligation for every republican government.

Back to the proposal floated by Fix UC. The idea is that students will not pay a dime for their education up front. After they have graduated, students agree to letting the UC system garnish their wages until their debt is paid off. Call it Social Security for education. Like Social Security, each generation pays the tuition and fees for the next.

So, who, in the end is actually paying the bill? The students of course. To be sure, one could argue that, insofar as the student’s wages come from an employer and insofar as a student will only accept a wage that will cover both their garnished wages—their past tuition and fees—plus their post-graduation living expenses and investments, this burden will place pressure on employers who will have to cover both.

Still, this is a pressure that no employer is obligated to meet, but that every student, upon employment, must meet.

Some will argue that, since it is the student and the student’s family that benefits from his or her education, it is only fair that he or she should foot the entire bill. But, then, where are the other investors and their stake in the student’s education?

Curiously enough, it was University of California President Mark Yudof who has raised this question most pointedly in the discussion over Fix UC. According to the NPR report, Yudof has made know that he would “prefer that the taxpayers pay their fair share — that we not treat higher education as a complete private good, in the sense that only the direct beneficiaries pay for it.”

The model that Fix UC contemplates is one that may be more appropriate for private colleges and universities, where students, their families, and future employers make no claim to public benefits, goods, or obligations. Which ought to give a moment’s pause to anyone tempted by the Fix UC solution.

The Fix UC solution contemplates a UC system that, for all intents and purposes, is private. Such a system welcomes private underwriters, donors, and sponsors. It makes no demands on state legislators or on California taxpayers who are, in any case, in no mood to help pay the salaries of faculty and staff or tuition for students. The very notion that public institutions serve public interests or that a quality education is a part of what liberal democratic republics do as a matter of course; that very notion is as anachronistic as, well, political candidates without super PACs.

The question, therefore, is not whether the UC system will go private. For all intents and purposes, it already has. The question is, now that it is private, which private sponsor will pay the bill?