Realistic utopianism for 20-year olds

My somewhat utopian idea would be similar to what you suggest and give everyone an educational credit at the age of 18 which would then be redeemed in a variety of ways at any time throughout the person’s life including university education, paid for by general taxation. It should work with some guarantee of equal value of alternatives with higher education probably being the measure as the most costly alternative.

The point is that one cannot in good faith talk about social justice in higher education in the UK without admitting the problems that run through the whole schooling system and the middle class, post code, school hopping phenomenon. I doubt that will change any time soon, yet I agree there is something to be gained if we have a broad based, though not identical, education beyond 18.

“My starting point is that, in a modern society and economy, nearly everyone needs to finish high school and the great majority need further education beyond that, if they are to thrive and prosper.”

That’s the assumption that needs to be tested. Is it really true that the majority of the population (or even age cohort) need some form of tertiary education?

More specifically, is it true that said majority need to be attending a place of education in order to gain whatever skills might be desirable?

It’s not all that long ago (certainly within my adult lifetime) that no degree was required to qualify as either an accountant or solicitor (all a degree did give you, other than that mind widening etc, was a free pass through some of the professional courses/exams), you could go off to work as a trainee and take your professional exams while working (articles in the law, might be the same word in accounting).

Sure, there’s the intellect expanding university thing (plus three years of boozing and shagging) but if we already agree that not everyone needs or wants straight academic training, why should those who need or want vocational training be fed through institutions more suited to the academic type?

OK, perhaps a blog populated by academics might not be the very best place to ask that question…..

It would I think (though there are plenty of cultural subtleties here to which I’m not attuned) ultimately imply an end to the presumption that university is somewhere you go away to, and its replacement with a presumption that hihg-quality education at all levels is something that should be available wherever you live.

I’m sorry, Prof Quiggin, but I am pretty sure university being a place to which you “go away” for several years a non-negotiable, basic, fundamental pre-condition. Without such a condition it is not a university, but rather a series of classrooms.

Pretty much every single attempt I have ever heard of to produce commuter universities have usually either ended up in miserable failure or bone-crushing mediocrity. The thing is bloody not on, as far as anyone actually going to university is concerned.

Bloody not on.

I’m sorry, Prof Quiggin, but I am pretty sure university being a place to which you “go away” for several years a non-negotiable, basic, fundamental pre-condition. Without such a condition it is not a university, but rather a series of classrooms.

Clearly the concept of distance learning has escaped this particular commentor.

I would agree with Phil, it seems like a really bad idea to defend public spending on higher education against the unfairness such spending imposes on the working class. That just legitimizes the obviously invented narrative that a policy that blatantly increases inequality and unfairness is actually motivated by fairness.

The 20 year credit idea does not seem all that politically feasible, but equal access to education has broad political support. So why not follow the Swedish model, no tuition fees and individual rights to loans (actually a percentage is a stipend) that cover living costs over your post-secondary education of choice/ability. The loans are financed by previous loan takers who pay back at a rate relative to their income. Such an approach greatly increases access for lower income groups and gets at the mobility problem (students have access to resources that allow them to move from home and attend schools in other parts of the country or even in another state). I would say that Swedish system definitely has a hierarchy in terms of quality as students compete for placement at attractive programs and institutions compete for students.

At any rate it seems that if you are looking for a realizable utopia one could start with the trying to identify the best system that is actually in place (ps. I look forward to hearing the several hilarious ways in which it would be impossible to implement anything remotely like a Swedish model anywhere else on the planet;)) .

“the class distribution of the benefits of university education are so clearly skewed towards the wealthy that I can’t engage at any other level”

1) Surely the best way to address this is to finance higher education in a way that improves the ability of the less wealthy to access education and not the opposite of that!
2) The statement seems to assume that it is necessarily the case that the indirect benefits the ‘non-post-secondary working class’ get from a good system of higher education are heavily outweighed ( presumably all redistributive policies considered) by how much they have to support this system through their taxes. I do not know if this has been the case in the UK (I don’t think so in Sweden). But if the tax rates are such that the wealthy are free-riding on the poor I guess that the obvious policy prescription is to change the tax rates. Sure this is probably utopian thinking (except for alien scandinaviland) but is it really anywhere as utopian as universal grants to 20 year olds?

I would agree with Phil, it seems like a really bad idea to defend public spending on higher education against the unfairness such spending imposes on the working class.

Not sure you are agreeing with Phil, actually. I think it’s a bad idea to start by thinking of public spending of any sort as a burden on the taxpayer. The problems are distributive – can we organise taxation in such a way that public spending is less of a burden on working people? can we organise higher education in such a way that its benefits don’t flow disproportionately to those who are already privileged? These aren’t questions the Coalition appear to be asking.

My suspicion (no more than that) is that, although university access in the 1960s & 70s was much more restricted than at present, that group was drawn from a broader and more socially representative pool – a smaller sample of a larger population.

I just took a look at my Oxford college photo from 1986, showing nearly all the undergraduates and a few of the postgrads.

Every single face on it is white.

I wonder if things have improved since then? I’d want convincing.

I propose that kids who want to become auto mechanics, electricians, plumbers, etc., would be trained as such in some non-university setting. Skilled trades provide a real value to society. I think that a career of this sort should pay off in a middle-class lifestyle.

There was a time when my ideal was somewhat close to reality, but I think it’s getting further away all the time.

@Chris 17: The idea of having more equal outcomes sounds ideal to me, but is probably something I would spend almost no effort supporting just because I think that, in the current climate, it is politically non-viable.

A more feasible ambition, if you ask me, is to make well understood arguments about how inquality of outcome can undermine inquality of oppurtunity and hence meritocracy – this is because arguing for meritocracy is often no effort, despite the fact that many people don’t really believe in it. Restricting education is not the answer, I agree, but John’s point about where the benefits accrue cannot be ignored.

_a system in which top-quality education is reserved for a few can never be fair._

“is reserved for” is ambiguous here between the claim that only a small number can get it and the claim that only a particularly restricted group can get it. Suppose we have one grande école and lots of universités, but we grant access to the grande école on the basis of a lottery which everyone above a certain threshold of high-school achievement can enter. Wouldn’t that be fair John?

Your implied criterion would justify (as happens to some extent in reality) giving better NHS services to well-off districts. In fact, it would justify a system in which public spending had no redistributive effect at all, that is, in which all classes put in the same amount as they received back in services.

Huh? I honestly can’t see how I have implied anything resembling that.

I have just been trying to find reasons for viewing your claim that low earners under a progressive tax system with free state education who do not go to university ‘pay for education they do not receive’ as anything other than meaningless rhetoric. I’ve failed.

There was a time when my ideal was somewhat close to reality, but I think it’s getting further away all the time.

People who have more than my very limited knowledge of Europe should correct me, but my impression is that it’s still more or less like that in Germany.

I’m not sure what’s ‘egregious’ about Oxford admitting only one student of Caribbean origin. You can’t make any conclusions about Oxford’s admissions system from that fact alone as you well know. The official Cambridge response to the David Lammy report was that the percentage of black students admitted was basically equal to the percentage getting 3 As at A level (the absolute minimum standard for admission), a much more useful statistic!

For example, only one “British black caribbean” was admitted last year: out of 35 who applied. Which is around and about the usual success rate for all applicants.

in 2005, according to the Times, Cambridge received 14,585 applications and Oxford 13,287, they admitted around 6,700. 4-5 candidates a place. Success rate, considerably more than 1 in 35.

“4-5 candidates a place. Success rate, considerably more than 1 in 35.”

Sure, now apply the law of small numbers.

“Cut a large dataset down to this level and these are just the sort of things that will jump out – Portugal had a similarly low acceptance rate, getting only one student accepted out of 25.”

Sure,

you said “usual success rate”. (I agree about the law of small numbers. I also agree the real problem lies elsewhere.)

The fact that the wealthy and powerful attend these institutions is constantly confused with the idea that these institutions via their superior education confer greater ability to achieve wealth and power, that there is some magically superior quality to the education received beyond the peer effect. I know as academics you have a vested interest in believing this, but is this borne out in the research? What exactly is the prior cultural capital and ultimate trajectory of the black undergrads? What did Cambridge give to Zadie Smith she didn’t already have? University (with the going away, college balls, etc.) has the same place in the middle-class imagination that “having a vocation” or “becoming a missionary” had for catholic parents a few generations ago, as a badge of transformation. But the reality is that people like Cameron and Boris Johnson exit pretty much exactly as they enter.

Creeping Credentialism is one of the biggest problems facing people entering the workforce. Some of it might be necessary but in my experience a majority of it is just the various guilds seeking to protect their turf. For example my mother is a Speech-Language Pathologist. When she started practicing in the early 1980s a bachelors degree was the expected qualification. Today it is required that you have at least a masters. I would love to know the reasoning behind this change as my mother and her colleagues seem to feel it is completely unnecessary.

Universities say they want to widen access, but the measures that would actually do this would fall foul of the Daily Mail and cries that they would be “unfair” to the credentialled children of the wealthy.

True. Universities used to be able to use 2E offers (etc.) reasonably liberally. Then — I forget exactly when — A Level results were made an official measure of university quality, and the rot set in. (IMO.)

an absolutely correct question
“I’d still like to see figures to support this. How much (£, or % of taxes paid) does this minority pay for higher education they do not receive?”
and also absolutely correct
assuming it is a problem after all then certainly
“… if the tax rates are such that the wealthy are free-riding on the poor I guess that the obvious policy prescription is to change the tax rates. ”
in particular this issue is simply and easily dealt with by steeply progressive taxation rates; doubtless with such rates, the working class would pay effectively zero for a benefit they many not have received and it would have the satisfactory result that those who achieve high incomes because of their educational background (though they may not be particularly well educated) will pay handsomely for they benefit
the reason for the silly and convoluted scheems envisoned by many wooly headed liberals is that they want to avoid this whole question of seriously taxing the rich
and then of course there is this truth via Armando
” It’s not race, but the generally shitty level of general education on offer to the working classes which is the problem.”

.

* sorry, didn’t expand my argument there.

Cradle to launch – because if we don’t universalize all the way along the birth-to-18 track, it makes everything else much harder. Part of the reason why Cambridge and Oxford are so elitist is that the elite are coming in with so much accumulated advantage – both in terms of intangibles like cultural and social capital and a style of dealing with bureaucracy and tangibles like food, books, clothing, housing, availability of parents and child care providers, and so forth – that efforts to work against this are to an extent bailing against the tide.
(Incidentally, is there such a thing as class-based affirmative action in British higher ed? I know there was that kerfuffle over Yvette Cooper’s thing earlier this year, but wasn’t clear on what it encompassed)

I don’t see any realistic way that fairness can ever begin at university-going age when opportunities prior to that have been radically unequal.

Chris Bertram:
Doesn’t y81 make a good point though? How do you tell the difference between a underutilized genius who just needs a chance and a charming slacker in the course of a 30 minute meeting? Heck some people manage to disguise their slackerness with charm for whole careers.

I’m with ajay. See under: George W. Bush. In the US the prestigious universities have always had affirmative action for upper-class idiots.

Doesn’t y81 make a good point though? How do you tell the difference between a underutilized genius who just needs a chance and a charming slacker in the course of a 30 minute meeting?

Well, you can’t, but interviews for positions of all sorts continue. Hand-wringing over certainty is an excuse to do nothing.

And I will add to my last post, that before some degree of meritocracy however imperfect was adopted, the Ivy League enrolled practically nothing but upper-class twits.

I’m afraid there’s no shortcut to a more equal and just society. It begins at birth or it doesn’t happen at all.

Bertram –

No. Not the SATs – the SATs are a really poor system that funnels everything through the bottleneck of “are you proficient at high school math” and “are you at the same time proficient in pedantic points of the English language.” It’s gotten a bit better with the essay segment, but it’s still a terrible test, both as a measurement tool and a predictor of academic success.

Substance McGravitas:
Hard to argue with that. However it still seems like randomly conducted interviews would not really be an improvement over the current system. Of course I say that with only an interested outsider’s knowledge of the UK’s university system.

36: “Are you sure it’s not possible for someone to be working class, a charming slacker AND an under-utilised genius?”

I know it is possible. Wait. Charming?

However it still seems like randomly conducted interviews would not really be an improvement over the current system. Of course I say that with only an interested outsider’s knowledge of the UK’s university system.

Well, presumably interviews aren’t conducted at random but from a pool of interested applicants, the same as with any other interview situation. I’m no expert on the UK system either, but whatever might go wrong in a system that allowed some flexibility you still wind up with an applicant who has to do the work and not just be magically granted a credential. (Unless, of course, your credential factory never fails anybody…)

Well, I say let everyone in. And let them stay at home. But then again, I work for the Open University, so I would.

I think that I’m closer to Chris B than to Ajay on the question of whether looser entry requirements were a good thing or not. There would undoubtedly have been a lot of noise in the system (hunky blond rowers seemed to find it very easy to get into Oriel to read -subject- in the mid 1980s, for example.) but if you’re going to be spending about 16 hours a year in someone’s company for the next three, and you’re forced to mark most of their work, you are probably more spring-loaded to go for the clever poor kid than the rich dunce among the uncredentialled.

“Suppose we have one grande école and lots of universités, but we grant access to the grande école on the basis of a lottery which everyone above a certain threshold of high-school achievement can enter. Wouldn’t that be fair John?”

This system is, amusingly enough, in operation in some respects. It’s operative in the selection within the Ivy League. Everyone with a certain level of achievement can get into the Ivy League, but within that selection for Harvard and Princeton are (unless you are an athlete/legacy/etc.) more or less pretty random at a certain level. (1)

I do want to gloss a bit that the reason it much more resembles Chris’s hypothetical lottery than seems at first glance is that the number of “open”, competitive spots at Harvard and Princeton is much, much lower than the enrollment. Once you discount the already allocated spots (athletes, legacies, donors) you have perhaps 1000 a year at Harvard and less at Princeton for the general applicant pool.

The common opinion seems to be that it’s horribly unfair, although it’s hard to say, really.

fn1: Yale is a bit less random, but it’s complicated.

What I’m saying is that admitting more poorly qualified students to universities will diminish the quality of the universities while doing little to affect inequality. And however unintended, I think that’s the likely outcome of some of the solutions mooted in this thread. In a US context, for example, I’m as ready as anybody to admit that the SAT sucks, but a little historical perspective will reveal that the system founded on them was a significant advance over the blatant class and religious bias that existed before.

There’s no way around the fact that we have to attack the factors that cause students from non-privileged backgrounds to be less qualified. No, that doesn’t mean we do nothing else in the meantime, but it does mean that that’s where the main focus needs to be.

Myles SG, we here in Australia seem to run an internationally competitive higher education system where probably 80% of Australian students don’t leave their home city. It is competitive enough that higher education has become Australia’s second largest export earner. Which has its own problems, of course, but failure and bone-crushing mediocrity don’t seem to be among them.

As a student, you might want to avoid assuming that all things different from the ones you already know are disastrous failures. It makes it hard to learn.

Substance, I’m sure you can find lots of similar examples of woo nonsense in the US and UK where most students go away. I was talking about the overall system, which is, on balance, neither of those things. Australian universities appear in each of the subject area top 50 lists in the Times Higher Ed list , which is not bad considering how small we are.

But hey, you and Myles carry on. Enjoy!

Substance, I’m sure you can find lots of similar examples of woo nonsense in the US and UK where most students go away.

I don’t think isolated woo is comparable to national training schemes that include homeopathy.

P.S.

Contrary to your suggestion, lots of people who would benefit from top-tier university education are excluded whether by SAT scores or inability to pay.

From my direct experience as a college teacher and as a parent of a student in the honors program at a large state university whose non-honors students are distinctly mediocre, I think there are a lot fewer of these people than you think, at least in the US. The sad fact is that poor high school preparation is very difficult to overcome, and students whose parents are not equipped to fill in the gaps are doubly disadvantaged. I’m a lot more worried about improving high schools (which in turn requires improving elementary and middle schools) than I am about more egalitarian access to my alma mater.

Wow. I really have to disagree on (virtually all of) your post. Firsly, I think it ignores the role of public higher education as promoting democracy itself – in the deliberative, Deweyian model.

I’m not sure what in my comment conflicts with this idea. Is your intention that 100% of the population would attend HE? If so, yeah, we disagree, but that just seems silly to me. I’m not sure college serves any purpose for more than half the population except to the extent it teaches students habits and skill they were supposed to learn in high school but did not. And I’m pretty sure that none of those students are developing the kind of insight and knowledge you are hoping for during their commuter school, scramble to get the credits to graduate experience. I suppose we could take the model that everyone will live off the public dime enjoying a broad education until the age of 24, but that sounds outlandishly expensive and I think many students would refuse to partake anyhow.

Regarding tuition support, a quick google check did not reveal anything substantive. Regardless of what the privates are doing, I think the most important thing is to provide a public HE structure like CA with top level universities, mid level state schools and commuter community colleges (and a cost structure like we saw 20 years ago). I continue to maintain that the HE system is there to train a productive workforce. I think academics are substantially over inclined to over estimate the value or interest a liberal arts HE has to the majority of students that don’t see a clear financial benefit. Or to put it differently: students are lazy and don’t care unless it will impact their future earnings. Trying to fight that is just a waste of money and energy.

I’m a lot more worried about improving high schools (which in turn requires improving elementary and middle schools) than I am about more egalitarian access to my alma mater.

It’s fairly true, actually. I struggled a bit intially at an elite American institution, and I had gone to one of Canada’s top prep schools beforehand. Bad preparation at the high school level is just not something you can wave away.

My own hope for a realistic utopianism (which has more to do with the state of affairs in the US than in the UK); a decent high school education for absolutely every teenager.

I can’t really think seriously about redesigning tertiary education from scratch when what (US) universities, even quite prestigious ones, impart to their students are writing and reasoning skills that the students should have developed in secondary school.

Can I ignore the effect of tertiary education on inequality? No: the university system is unjust. Can I ignore the marginal effect of tweaking tertiary education in an egalitarian direction? Absolutely. If this is supposed to be an exercise in realistic utopianism, it’s silly to imagine a just tertiary system from the ground up while imagining that the secondary system remains completely unchanged. But if we do reimagine the entire educational system from the ground up, then (i) the egalitarian effects of the new primary and secondary systems would swamp the effects of the new tertiary system, and (ii) it may not make sense to reimagine the tertiary system until we see what sort of students graduate from high school in a realistic utopia.

* whoops, lost the second paragraph from the blockquote. Sorry.

@Tim Worstall: It’s not all that long ago (certainly within my adult lifetime) that no degree was required to qualify as either an accountant or solicitor.

Very true. If, for example, you want to be a lawyer in a certain state in U.S., you have to take the bar exam in that state. To take the bar exam, besides of course paying a few thousands of dollars, you need to go to an accredited law school. To get into an accredited law school in most cases you need a B.A. Same for doctors. One should reduce the power of the guilds that protect their members and impose bottle-necks of all sorts. The importance of tertiary education would decrease and so guaranteeing access to educational resources of similar quality, whatever that exactly means, would be less of a concern.

Moreover, focusing on more access to education, maybe unintentionally, fosters the idea that, if you do not have a B.A. degree (actually a post-graduate degree in U.S.), you have a lower social status.

omega @90
I already said that @53.
Ivan Illich was considered interesting, but was totally ignored (so much so that I think he is mostly now out of print). Personally, I think he had a point. But we can’t really expect much support I suppose from a website dominated by academics with a vested interest in the current system, can we.-)

I can’t ever see these ideas working. There are (at least) two main reasons:

Clever people like to be with clever people; very clever people like to be with very clever people. Over time you should always expect bright academics to migrate to the place where the other bright academics are. (One could do a formal demonstration of this using Schelling’s Models of Segregation). So, absent pretty aggressive state intervention, the idea of no elite institutions is a non-starter.

Secondly, what you’re proposing is incredibly inefficient. Put a smart academic into a department of dumb academics and, if the department is one in which any kind of collaborative effort is required, you massively reduce the smart academic’s effectiveness. Time which could be spent doing useful, original work gets wasted explaining to all the spare wheels stuff which they should know already. Conversely, one would expert there to be positive network effects in departments made up entirely of smart academics; Princeton’s IAS wasn’t just set up for reasons of corporate vanity.

A society which organised its higher education system along the lines you’re proposing would be much worse off. To prevent the migration effect (smart academics wanting to be with their peers) you’d have effectively to curtail freedom of movement in some way. And (a bigger point in the scheme of things) the fact that you’d reduced the productiveness of your academic elite would clearly have knock-on effects on innovation and wealth creation. Why would you want to do any of this?

Oliver makes a good point. Don’t we want all these super genius cooped up together thinking up ingenious new solutions to the worlds problems? Maybe the real problem is the continued association of two very different tasks, research and education, in a single institution?

Don’t we want all these super genius cooped up together thinking up ingenious new solutions to the worlds problems?
If there ever was an age for super geniuses, it’s long past. Solutions to the world’s problems require massive manpower, with lots of specialization. Think about cell research and the accompanying medical research. It is done by thousands upon thousands of people, in 100s of institutes of different stripe all around the world, each focussed on clarifying some small part of a bigger picture. And teaching is rather crucial to getting the generation of manpower, because you’re not going to solve all the problems in this generation.

A few super geniuses cooped together might be more romantically pleasing than research on industrial scales, but efficient it is not.

Isn’t the IAS a notorious failure, in that everyone who goes there does worse work than they did before they were there?

Feynman is not a great example as he was such a one-off intuitionist: for someone who was a great lecturer he failed to leave a legacy of successful graduate students. Collaboration doesn’t seem to have been his strong suit.

But in practice, the world is filled by institutes, state-pushed and otherwise pushed, that try hard to become concentrations of clever people. Presumably, without such pushing smart people would prefer to stay where their friends live and where their kids are going to school.

I’m a bit unsure about this. Rutherford didn’t stay in New Zealand. He left his family and went halfway round the world (by steam ship, yet) to Cambridge because Cambridge was where the clever people were – people like Rayleigh and Thomson. And Chandrasekhar left his family in India and went halfway round the world to Cambridge because that’s where Rutherford and Eddington and Dirac were. And basically everyone in the world went to Copenhagen at some point because that’s where Bohr was. I don’t think there was any other push involved, really.

Zamfir:
Do the really brilliant people do much teaching anyway? From my time in both undergraduate and graduate programs at universities the really great minds do very little actual in classroom teaching. It is mostly junior professors and TAs. Why not create two sets of institutions? One for training/teaching and one for research. Those who show real brilliance at the former can apply for positions at the later.
/Sorry for the threadjack.

Thank you Steve. I did not know the root of that connection.

“if we take most West European countries, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to be roughly similar in general standard of living, then we also see a range of countries with massively different HE systems. Some of these are very elite oriented, others not so much.”

But are we able to demonstrate any correlation between the HE systems and the other characteristics of the various societies, including without limitation their levels of social or economic equality or the welfare of their lowest quintile?

Oliver – isn’t the eliteness under discussion the eliteness of having money? Because I don’t think it’s true that, ceteris paribus, being rich makes you smarter.

“ceteris paribus” is carrying a lot of load here. Yes, it’s true in the sense that if you have a pair of twins who are brought up identically in a rich family, and then one of them loses all his money in a freak accident, he won’t suddenly become much less intelligent than the other. But intelligence – or, not to be invidious, let’s say “potential for future academic achievement” – has a lot to do with nurture as well as nature, and if you’re brought up in a state of severe deprivation, then that’s going to have an impact, even if you attend exactly the same sort of school as everyone else. This is sort of what I was trying to say in 96.

@dsquared, OK, the IAS is a lousy example; what about MIT? Or Stanford?

@Chris Bertram It’s accurate to say that the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have generally similar standards of living, nor do I think standard of living is the relevant measure. All I’m interested in (in this context) is wealth generation, not how that wealth is getting shared around. The US is clearly a lot better at that than the other countries you mentioned (US GDP per capita at PPP is $47k, Australia, next highest on the list, has $40k; the US is 17.5% higher, a non-trivial difference).

The question is; would GDP per capita in the US be as high if all the super-elite universities had been broken up, and their faculties dispersed to regional hubs? I doubt it.

The absence of an Australian Cambridge (UK or MA) doesn’t seem to harm the Australian economy relative to that of the UK.

That’s not a good argument against there being Cambridges though. We might imagine Cambridge to be a global public good, generating ideas and advances that are of little benefit, relative to cost, to the host society, but of cost-free benefit to the rest of the world. If every country merely considered its own narrow self-interest and opted for an anti-elitist policy, there might be no Cambridges at all and we would be worse off for it.

In the U.C’s model budget, the student is expected to work enough to save $4,000 a year and take out $5000 a year in loans. A family making $20,000 a year is expected to kick in $9,100 a year (or 45.5% of yearly income), a family making $40,000 will have to come up with $11,600 (or 29% of yearly income), a family making $60,000 will have to come up with $16,100 (26.8%), and a family making $80,000 will have to come up with $22,600 (or 28.25%).

This kind of support is atrocious. A family making 20K/year ends up paying 14K/year in tuition? 15 years ago that was the annual cost of attending a UC. If those numbers are correct, I don’t see why we need to get into debates about utopias to understand that lower class access to HE is far less than it should be. A family making 20K/year should be able to send their kids to a public school for free, with minimal loans.

mpowell, this tragedy is being played out in every state. Elite public universities were once intended as the means of access to a top-quality education for all who can benefit from it, but underfunding has turned that into an unfunny joke.

“you should be looking at output per hour worked, not total output, which wipes out most of the US advantage relative to other developed economies.”

This position has been gaining some traction among left/liberal economists over the past decade or so, but it remains rather a minority view. It tends to be invoked very selectively. I don’t recall any Krugman columns lauding the dramatic growth in productivity per hour worked during the Bush administration. He was all frothing about the iniquity of the policies that were producing a “jobless recovery.” For that matter, I seem to recall Galbraith treating it as a good thing that the Soviet Union had no unemployment, not as a U.S. strength that we produced lots of stuff without using our entire labor force.

At a minimum, one would have to provide a lot more definition of purposes and evaluation criteria before telling someone that they “ought” to be looking per hour GDP instead of per capita.

@118: What would be the point, then? The rejected students are getting similar educations at some other prestigious university, and the applicants as a whole are benefiting from being part of various academic communities which operate on a human scale. Let’s ignore the obvious difficulties with building more lecture halls in Cambridge: if we built a spacious university campus for 50,000 undergraduates out in the cornfields somewhere, shipped all the instructors and students who are currently in the Ivy League to the new campus, and called it “Harvard”, what exactly would that accomplish?

andthenyoufall – similar, but not equal.In both the U.S and U.K, access to the halls of power is really concentrated at the top, such that even really smart people who get substantially similar educations have quite different outcomes.

The historical example of this has been the U.K Civil Service, where Oxbridge graduates have made up a huge proportion of the top levels (and still form a plurality of the total workforce). The U.S case is a bit trickier, due to the more diffuse power structure, but the current U.S Supreme Court is entirely Ivy League, with 5 Harvard grads, 3 Yalies, and one Columbian.

Steven: isn’t this a case of having plus eating? First, it’s not clear whether what bothers you is the elitism of Harvard or the elitism of elite colleges; and while I’ll grant you that Harvard could double the size of its entering class without any huge decline in student quality (the dean of admissions said something equivalent, once), elite colleges as a whole certainly couldn’t double the size of their entering class without dipping down into a different class of applicant.

Second, if the education a student gets at Harvard (or some other prestigious college?) isn’t equal to the education s/he would get at a different college, then why do we imagine that Harvard (or ~?) could double its student body and provide the same education? Is Michael Sandel going to teach courses with 2,000 students, instead of 1,000? Or would Harvard have to scrounge around for twice as many professors to teach its students? I assume this is what you have in mind. But where would those professors come from, who would endow their chairs, who would replace them at their old institutions, and would they be a perfect substitute for the previous professors?

In short, it seems to me that you can either accept that there are no interesting differences between a Harvard education and one at other schools – in which case, why bother? Or there are significant differences – in which case, why would you assume that you can scale it up?

Third, if you’re ultimately concerned not with access to an *education* at a prestigious school but the perks of the prestigious degree, do you really think you can scale that up? Professional schools won’t double their class sizes to accept more Harvard applicants; ex-rowers on Wall Street won’t suddenly have twice as many entry level jobs for rowers; final clubs won’t double in size; famous professors won’t supervise the research of twice as many budding academics.

@37

While it’s obviously true that there are people who could benefit from Oxbridge admission but lack the basic entry requirements, we really don’t know the numbers involved! Not that I don’t agree that the best universities should make more of an effort to widen access, though the best way to do this is really not clear.

Are you saying out of the entire freshman class of 4.55 million in the U.S, there aren’t another 1-7,000 with 2400 SATs and 4.0 GPAs?

In 2006 the number of college bound seniors who achieved a score of 2400 was 238.

Steven A. — What I was trying to push you to clarify is now clear: you don’t really care about the details of the student body or the education it would receive (much less the details of hiring “professors and whatnot”), because the real focus of your concern is on the “inside track” that a Harvard diploma grants its graduates. Which is understandable.

But now I want to ask: what kind of inside track are you talking about? I wrote out a long post detailing two alternatives, but I don’t want to be so leading. I’d just ask you for details, noting that I’m skeptical that there exists an “inside track” (i) which would be automatically scaled up in proportion to the size of the student body at the schools currently considered prestigious, (ii) to which it would actually be desirable to grant more, rather than fewer, people access, and (iii) which doesn’t rely ultimately on assumptions about the abilities of the students and the quality of their education .

I’m so utterly confused. The inside track is privilege, okay, but then what is privilege?

What I’m trying to get at is this. A Panglossian, smug labor economist might tell you that the reason why a Harvard diploma opens so many doors (and the next most prestigious diploma opens fewer doors, and so on down the line) is that employers value the intelligence and self-discipline that successful applicants to Harvard have, and the skills and ideas that Harvard’s professors impart. (And likewise, as you descend through diplomas that open fewer doors, that represents slightly less intelligence, self-discipline, and education.) In other words, a Harvard diploma is a signal about the relevant characteristics of the average recipient of a Harvard diploma.

But if this theory of the open doors is true, then doubling or tripling the number of people at each prestigious school would only result, in the end, in fewer, larger schools, rather than in the access of more students to an “inside track”. The professors at American universities would not be imparting more knowledge to students, and the students would not be more intelligent or self-disciplined, so it wouldn’t be possible to raise employers estimation of the skills of various degree holders by doubling the number of students at each school.

On the other hand, someone with a darker view of how doors open up to (some of!) the graduates of prestigious universities would say that there are a certain number of people connected to, say, Harvard who can open doors, and they open doors for a small number of people whom they like, and no one else. A Senator might have lunch with some students, and then recommend that some of them get jobs. A famous professor might work closely with a student on a research project, and then recommend that she be admitted to a PhD program. Or – most likely – an undergraduate social organization which provides a space for rich young men to develop cocaine habits will introduce its current members to alumni, who will help them find suitable jobs on Wall Street.

But if this theory is true, then it’s not clear what doubling the enrollments of prestigious universities accomplishes. It won’t double the number of Senators; it won’t double the number of famous professors, or the number of undergraduate research projects each one supervises; and it certainly won’t double the membership of exclusive undergraduate social organizations, which exist for the sake of exclusivity.

(Or to look at it from the perspective of labor demand, towards which you gestured in your last paragraph: If employers demand workers with a specific bundle of skills and qualities, then demand for Harvard grads might be quite elastic, but only so long as Harvard grads continue to represent the same bundle of skills and qualities. If, on the other hand, employers simply have a number of jobs which they are able to distribute as spoils to people they like, they might not care too much about the skills of the Harvard grads they hire, but doubling the number of Harvard grads won’t double the size of the spoils system.)

in a situation where everyone pays taxes, and most (but not all) get a benefit funded by those taxes, the remainder are paying taxes for a benefit they don’t receive

Everyone in Britain pays taxes. The majority (women) get access to NHS breast cancer screening. The minority (men) do not. So men are paying taxes for a benefit (access to NHS breast cancer screening) they do not receive. And this is ‘inequitable’. Correct?

Perhaps you can see where this leading?

andthenyoufall – come on, the impact of alumni networks on access to the top positions is not hard. The old school tie works in a way not dissimilar to internal hiring networks within a corporation, and expanding and making more representative the pool of people who can draw on that network makes that network more open and more meritocratic. I.E, there’s a reason why less than five black applicants were picked for the Civil Service fast-track and it has a lot to do with the racial makeup of Oxbridge.
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/12/civil-service-complacency-on-black-applicants-is-not-good-enough/

Now, obviously labor demand is an issue. But I find it hard to believe in the extreme that there aren’t 6,655 inner-track jobs out there that couldn’t be filled by a more open Harvard class. It just seems like a strong case too far.

(For clarity, I never objected to the claim that people who don’t attend university are likely to earn less, on average, than those that do.)

Those mechanisms absolutely can help students if we make universities larger and egalitarian. See: Sotomayor, Sonia.

Yes, but such a system cannot really exist. You can’t stop people from using cultural capital without having someone present at every job interview, and you couldn’t prevent recruiters using particular campuses as hunting grounds to get around that.

People in the poorest quintile(s) pay taxes. They also receive financial benefits from the government (eg. income support, unemployment benefit) and benefits in kind (education, housing, health care, council services, etc). If the tax and welfare system is adequately re-distributive the amount of benefits would be on average greater than the amount of taxes they pay, so they are net recipients of funds from the government. People in the higher quintiles otoh would pay more in taxes than they receive in services. Given this situation, how does it make sense to think of those in the lower quintiles as ‘paying’ for those services that are provided to those in the higher quintiles?

You also seem to suggest in some places anybody who pays taxes, and doesn’t receive a given publically funded service, has some claim of justice that they are being unfairly treated. I think that is ridiculous, and it leads swiftly to the conclusion that any public provision of services that are not provided to all taxpayers is ‘unfair’.

How does the UK Education Maintenance Allowance (recently abolished) fit into the Quiggin Theory of Justice? Given what you have written above, I assume you likewise think it was UNFAIR because kids who left school at 16 and got jobs did not receive it but still ended up paying taxes…

Or to put it another way: I think that those in the lowest quintile should get much more in material terms than they currently get. I just don’t think the reason for this is that they are currently paying for stuff they don’t receive. And I don’t think that privatising post-16 education and distributing the proceeds as Ackerman-style grants would a a step forward.

Engels, I’ve obviously pushed some hot button with the point about the poor paying taxes and not receiving services

FFS. What I specifically objected to in your post is the following statement:

[it is inequitable that] the minority (probably poorer on average) [ie. those who leave education before 21 and go on to earn lower wages and pay lower taxes on average] pay for benefits they don’t receive

I’ve explained — quite carefully in some places, eg. 152 — what I still think is obviously wrong with this and why it leads easily to a pro-privatisation policy agenda. I don’t think you’ve given a serious response, leaving aside the unconvincing amateur philosophy in #141 about it being a ‘logical tautology’. Otherwise, your only response has been
(i) lame jokes about the meaning of ‘post-natal care’
(ii) repeating it in a separate post and deleting objections
(iii) speculating about my motives
(iv) making patronising claims that as a British person I can’t debate this topic without getting emotional
(v) goal-post shifting

Further engagement on this issue is clearly not a good use of either of our time.

Rob@70:
“My software engineer’s utopia is that 18-year-olds would be taken on by employers, with free high-quality theory education taking up about a year in total, spread over their first three years of employment. Instead of >£10k of debt, they’d make a profit as they’d be being paid (albeit not much, perhaps) for their work. I’ve no idea how this would generalise into other subjects.”

You’ve just re-invented the apprenticeship system, which has served very well as the higher education for the lower and middle classes since before the university system was invented. It generalizes very well into other subjects- if it is set up, and if some other conditions are in place.

I think an apprenticeship system requires a guild or union to be successful. It may not appear that way on the surface, but without a guild or union to 1. control the downward push on wages that will always come from the corporation and 2. prevent the corporation from hollowing out the apprenticeship, it will become an empty credential. In the US, building trades apprenticeships are controlled by joint employer-union committees, and the employers constantly push to have requirements watered down, and the unions constantly push to make sure the apprentices have been given a thorough education by the time they journey out. In my trade this system is breaking down, because the social contract that led to crusty, grumpy old journeymen showing the younguns the ropes is also breaking down. In the middle of the last century, those crusty old journeymen could imagine that the younguns they had at their side were stand-ins for their own sons and nephews; they might know the old journeyman who was teaching their own son, and be watching him. They were given an education, an entry into a secure, dignified, and prosperous middle class life, and they passed that along to those who they could see as following in their footsteps. Rather similar to the brotherhood of upper-crust English fellows at Oxbridge in the middle of the past century, I imagine.

In the 70s many unions were forced to integrate and had to allow in a lot of non-white, and even some non-male, apprentices. They also lost the residential building market, and lost tremendous market share. The old guard no longer had a grip on the market. With the unions much weaker in the union-employer power struggle, the training of apprentices is no longer consistent. Some companies conscientiously rotate apprentices among different apprentices and specialties to develop them as journey workers; others just use them as cheap labor and lay them off when they reach 4th bracket. It’s bad for the future of the industry, but what company can afford to care about the future of the industry when there are quarterly profits to be made?

Unions or guilds, if they are powerful, can look out for the future of the industry and have an incentive to insure good education of apprentices. They can also use their power to shut out minorities, women, the poor, or whoever doesn’t belong to the club, and increase inequality. But with no brake whatsoever on entry into the labor market, wages race to the bottom.

This whole debate about access to higher education would be less important if, as JQ points out, there were less inequality of outcome, and if a trades education- whether in plumbing, accounting, home health care, or software engineering- were run through apprenticeships and resulted in reasonable access to jobs that paid a good living wage for a middle-class existence, whether bright young people were shut out of Oxbridge would matter a great deal less. And unions, regulated credentials, or other restrictions to entry into the labor market are what produce a living wage. Unions have not always been fair stewards of that access to that modest wealth. (2% female participation in the building trades after forty years of pressure). But universities are hardly better.

And there is great benefit to having a diversity of restricted institutions that lead to a secure and decent wage. For the bright, articulate, and organized, there is higher education. For the physically talented, there are the building trades. Women and minorities are (currently) out of luck, but being a felon is no barrier to a long and productive career as a pipefitter. We need these spaces in society for people who succeed and fail at different things, and I think having a bunch of them that have different sets of discrimination may be as good as we can get. The problem in the US is that both higher education and the more lucrative unions discriminate strongly against blacks, and the trades and IT discriminate strongly against women, leaving those groups entirely out in the cold. (probably other groups too, though those are the ones I’m familiar with).

There are hairdressing and cosmetician apprenticeships in many US states, too. But without any body to protect the wages of hairdressers and cosmeticians, they are of little value to the prosperity of their students, whether they impart useful training or not.

RMT calls for full support for student fees protests December 7 2010

… RMT has written to all its branches and is directly emailing and texting members urging them to support the local protests on Wednesday and the national protest on Thursday – the day of the Commons vote. RMT General Secretary Bob Crow, who will be speaking at the 3pm rally at the Westminster end of Victoria Embankment on Thursday 9 December, said:

“Last week students supported our tube members on their picket lines and this week we will be out shoulder to shoulder with the students in their protests over the jacking up of tuition fees. It is essential that the entire Labour and Trade Union Movement gives full support to the student protests – this extraordinary grass roots movement has caught the ConDems on the hop and when your enemy is reeling you don’t give them a chance to regroup, you mobilise the maximum pressure that you can and that’s what RMT is doing right now.” […]

Yes, your proposals makes sense now. I was thinking of vocational schooling and training as a part of the (upper) secondary education system.

engels (3 and 9) is completely right. John Quiggin accepts the premise that here is no such a thing as education as a public good that should be paid for by the public. When you start the debate by accepting that, you have already lost (if your objective is any kind of progressive reform). Why are we publicly funding libraries, parks, etc. (if we do)? There’s a chance that these institutions are used more relatively speaking by the middle class than by the poor. If we see that as a problem, the solution isn’t to give up the idea of providing public goods. The solution is to find ways of getting more out of them for the poor. I don’t think it would be very hard for the government to develop reforms based on that goal if that really were the goal. Of course it isn’t.

I have to say that I found JQ’s opening statement, accusing the protesting students of defending an unfair status quo (as if they were the ones who invented it), condescending and short-sighted in the extreme and I am really pissed to be honest with you. If that is where progressive debate has gotten to there’s no surprise society is taking giant steps backwards to 19th century social darwinism.