The mistake of comparing higher education to a market

Andrew Kelly and Kevin James assert a number of interesting points in their paper Untapped Potential, but I question the ideas and justification behind much of what they have to say about ‘making the higher education market work for students and taxpayers.’

First, there is the assumption grounded in the title of the piece that higher education is a market. I understand the practical merits of talking about the higher education sector as though it were a market, for the sake of differentiating the parties involved, defining their interests, and identifying factors at play that ultimately shape ‘supply,’ ‘demand,’ and ‘consumer choice.’ Higher education is obviously thought of as being a market by many scholars and policymakers alike, but I view education as a fundamental human right and see it as a ‘commodity’ that the state has a significant interest in making available to its citizens (much like food, shelter, healthcare). So to call higher education a market and to assume a competitive process for distribution is in my opinion an irresponsible and unequitable way to educate the masses.

Next, I question the notion that we can ‘modernize’ the oversight role that the federal government plays without expanding it. A performance floor that would remove the worst-performing institutions out of the federal aid poole will inevitably have negative consequences for institutions who have a tougher time conforming to the standards decided by regulators. While it may be difficult for schools to meet these standards for the intended reason, to weed out sub-par institutions whose degrees do not help their students, I wonder how regulators would be able to single out such specific metrics in a way that doesn’t have an adverse impact on institutions that in fact just serve hard-to-educate populations. This kind of performance-based funding, as discussed by McKeown-Moak, could easily result in much unintended harm for those very communities who stand to gain the most from their bachelor’s degree.

The proposition that ‘new authorizers’ should be used to play an oversight role troubles me as laid out here. The idea that employers, nonprofits, and professional associations should be exercising influence over the institutional accountability mechanisms is concerning because none of these bodies is accountable to anybody but their interests/members/stakeholders/funding bodies. Where public entities and government agencies are accountable to the public, these organizations play are much more peripherally involved with the outcome of the higher education process. In my opinion the influence over the process should be just as peripheral.

I do believe that there should be more information available about educational outcomes so that prospective students can take such information into account when picking a college if they are in a socioeconomic position to decide on that basis. However, I want to say something here about the notion that federal loans should be capped. This argument seems to often be justified by claims that ‘educational consumers’ either don’t have enough information or don’t have the right information available to them to take out a sustainable level of loans. The idea that students should be limited in the amount of loans they can take because they don’t know what’s best for themselves is patronizing and unfair. That’s not a decision for government nor a regulatory body to make. Such caps will indeed lower default rates of holders of these loans. However, this is inevitable at least in part due to the fact that students who need to take out large amounts of debt are exactly the students who would be deterred from attending an institution with such a cap in place. This is because they probably can’t attend that university if they don’t have access to those high loans — they wouldn’t incur that debt if they didn’t need to do so, contrary to the preaching of certain administrators.