Musings of an Educational Entrepreneur
By Benjamin Franklin
This column gives education leaders the opportunity to discuss higher education issues. For more information contact Jenny Faubert at 920-264-0199 or jfaubert@careereducationreview.net.
Ben Franklin here! I shudder every time I hear the Tories talk about the King and his God-given right to govern. It is hard to understand how “We the people” could give King George what he referred to as the unfettered right of the King.
Looking forward to 2019, I cannot understand the attraction of the Democrats swooning over socialism. We fought a revolution so that people can be free to make their own decisions; decisions which are the right ones for the individual. The people resented being told that they had to obey the King and did not have a right to choose.
The Democrats believe that education should be an entitlement as long as people choose to go to a publicly funded school.
Private education – and heaven forbid for-profit higher education – is too expensive, too corrupt, and, since they know better, should be free. They ignore the fact that public K-12 education in the United States, which is free, and in many cases sub-standard. Wealthy families and those who truly care about their children beg, borrow and steal to send them to a private school. Charter schools have sprung up like weeds in order to give families a positive alternative. The enlightened Higher Education Act, which provided funding for students to make their own choice for postsecondary education, made choice the important mantra of that seminal legislation. Students could get grants and/or loans to choose from the diverse group of institutions available in the public, private and for-profit sectors. However, the Democrats are obsessed with limiting this choice.
I could almost go along with these “Progressives,” if they were not so blind from the shortcomings of the public sector. Just recently, Miami Dade College, America’s largest community college, received the Aspen Award as one of the most outstanding institutions of its kind. In accepting the award, the college celebrated its “outstanding 42 percent” success rate (graduation, in addition to transfers).
No one looked at the fact that almost six out of 10 of their students failed to reach their educational objective.
Neither do Progressives understand that the costs of these public institutions. Both two and four-year institutions are not what the student pays, but a combination of tuition and public subsidies. By law, some states can only charge the student 25 percent of direct education costs. This does not include construction, land or overhead, when calculating the student tuition. In fact, out-of-state tuition of most of the state universities is higher than many of the state private institutions, again excluding the indirect costs. These voodoo economics, as President Bush so famously described, demonstrate the Progressive’s dislike of competition and free market considerations.
I am concerned that the political drumbeat of higher education policy resembles the socialist/authoritarian mantra of the Tories. The private sector, both for-profit and not-for-profit, must hang together to resist the siren of free education, or they surely will hang separately.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of CER.