Is education a service/business?

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

The US seems to have colossal fees, with the top universities charging in excess of $50k for a year’s tuition, amounting to nearly a quarter of a million dollars trying to get a bachelor’s. Of course, the US also has a large number of scholarships so not all that many students would be paying the full fee. The question this raises however, and a big issue in the UK at the moment, is about whether or not fees should continue to be capped. Most UK home students pay a maximum of ~3k at the moment. The debate is whether or not to lift the cap, which if done, would push many fees up to about 10k a year for a 3 year bachelor’s.

The question is, do universities perform a social service by educating and providing national industry with qualified talent, in which case they should charge a low amount to ensure all people can go to university regardless of financial position, or are they simply businesses catering to demand, free to charge as they wish?

I’m inclined to think they perform a public service so long as it’s on the undergraduate level. In postgraduate courses, it may well work more like a business since specialization in an academic field is more capital intensive, has less demand, and is above the minimum undergrad standard that employers expect. To further the case, at the postgraduate level, the individual should be able to cooperate with industry to bring in some revenue, which the undergrad would not be qualified to do. Any thoughts?

2

Why cap it? Why not just force the educators to teach whoever wants to be educated and have the government pay them whatever it deems is a “fair” wage? Why acknolwedge the educators as having rights at all? They “chose” to be teachers right? Surely that makes them public servants - subject to whatever the public wants - on whatever terms the public offers? Just like doctors - teachers aren’t in it for the money - so what they get paid shouldn’t really matter right?

3

A business of indoctrinating young minds into the federal corporation, to place slaves into their proper areas of expertise.

4

For some, “education” is similar to agriculture.

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Thank you for your valuable input, we can all be stuck at 16 and too cool for school together.

6

Free thinkers are antithesis to the business of education.
And to some degree your wants and desires have been produced by the technological techniques of the corporations.

7

Not when it’s run by the government. As we all know, profit is evil, money or education-wise, but government schools are a good tool for indoctrination–at which it has been wildly successful beyond any liberal’s dreams over the last 50 years.

Yes, there are some good government schools, but not through any fault of a government bureaucrat.

Yes indeed. Harvesting bumper crops of little dumbed down useful idiots every year, the largest proportion being among the ranks of post-grads and those with tenure it would seem.

8

Is intelligence taught, or innate? What does education represent except a language of society? Why learn English in an English speaking country when you could learn Swahili instead? Oh, because your SOCIETY demands that you learn English. That is why. And society ALSO DEMANDS that you learn math, so when you approach the grocery counter, that you are sure you are not being ripped off, and we avoid many conflicts this way. If you don’t learn math, then how would you even count your drug money??? Drug money, by the way, is a part of SOCIETY again. So what can even become taught except something social?

Where does real or true education begin except in your (philosophical) UNEDUCATION? You have to UNLEARN a bunch of bullshit, like Global Warming, and trusting politicians, and trusting Gods, all that fairy tale bullshit we are all brought up to believe in, and to ascribe purpose within. All, meaningless drivel. So, now we may see where any real ‘intelligence’ begins and ends. Because, what makes a man intelligent, or any basic mammal, is its ability to adapt to an environment in which it finds itself. We, for example, find ourselves stuck at the beginning of two millenniums after Christ. And this is our environment, now. Now, perhaps you will unlearn, or, continue believing all the bullshit everybody spills into your minds.

Let us review. Why do we need English except to communicate with our neighbors? Cooperation. Why do we need math except to deal with consumers? Trade. Why do we need to learn right from wrong except to avoid jail? Morality. Yet, just about every mammalian group on the planet does the exact same things, in different ways. Are we so special as humans? No. What we are learning are a system of codes, evolved over thousands of years now, to integrate ourselves together, to share and partake in a Commonwealth. This is the very nature and reason for indoctrination (of minds) in the first place. Culling. Cull them while they are young. Sew your seeds right. And plant your fields well. So, yes, education is akin to agriculture. And intelligence is not correlative to the process of becoming educated, unless, by education you meant SLAVERY. So, now, let us ask, who originally brought these systems up?

Who brought us our first Academy into the world??? Who started this system of indoctrination, over 2000 years ago??? Think long and hard. For this system of integration begins farther back than anyone may initially guess. And to unlearn your education, means to travel backward in time, to unlearn not just what YOU have learned in your life, but what generations have learned in the past, and before them, and before them. We go far-far-far back, to before the academy. And before these systems of education (and propaganda) were put into place. If you can do this, then you can see, in fact, whether Education is truly a service or a business. Since it is both, to serve … who??? That is the real question.

Who does education serve, except our Commonwealth??? One that we may or may not share, in the first place.

9

Dairdo, I’ll post here to avoid derailing the other thread.

America is a capitalist country with a fear of socialism. Yet to my knowledge, it has a social welfare system as well as a minimum wage, both of which are socialist principles. The point, before it gets lost, that I was making is that a person is not either a socialist or a capitalist. By insisting on the labels, you lose sight of the merits of an argument. Which is exactly what happened in the education thread. You assumed that I was a socialist, and that I was advocating all socialist principles, and you in turn acted as a free market ideologue and skipped over the specific argument. Also, by saying that you ‘increase taxes for…’, it’s phrased as if that specific thing is responsible for an increase in taxes. It’s a misleading statement.

Financial deregulation was a key cause of the crisis. Referring to the repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999, whereby investment/retail banks like Citi would risk depositors’ money in high risk investments. Referring to lack of regulation of mortgage brokers, who bore zero risk by transferring all the new mortgages to an investment bank, who in turn passed it around offloaded insured and reinsured etc. and led to the freezing of credit and the system’s heart attack. Referring to the ratings agencies amassing huge fees by giving AAA to junk bonds. What do you think caused the crisis? And let’s not talk about the US government forcing banks to lend to poor people. Their native markets were too saturated to make any decent money and they rode the wave until it crashed.

I don’t know Transocean’s safety record, but looking at this particular case, it’s logical to claim that they didn’t have adequate failsafe mechanisms. Accidents happen. For example, you can get into a car crash. That’s an accident. But your car is meant to deform and the glass is meant to shatter a specific way so that you survive with minimal injuries. That’s what a good system does, it anticipates the failure modes and ensures that it can deal with them when they occur. This oil rig was clearly not a good system if it didn’t take the failure of the shutter valve into account.

The nuclear point I made was simply to show that a lot of emerging technologies need to be aided before being commercially viable. Nuclear had significant upside, but also significant risk. Governments were, and still are, required to bear some of that risk in order to take advantage of the upside. By doing that, they’ve allowed nuclear to develop so as to increase its capacity factor by nearly 20% in under 15 years. The argument is that renewables similarly need time to mature. They will, but we can’t rely on the market to decide. The market doesn’t take social and political factors into account. If so many people starve because oil is too expensive, that’s not the market’s fault. Government aid is needed to ensure alternatives are found before they become a market necessity and cause havoc with peoples’ lives. And on a separate point, the market doesn’t take the carbon price into account outside the EU, hence tipping the scale in fossil fuels’ favor.

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I understood your point before. And my point, is that despite what you believe, and whether you realize it or not, your entire argument stems from a very specific set of philosophical principles - the very ones that underpin socialism. A fundamental belief that the individual is subjugated to the society - that in principle the needs of the society trump the needs of the individual - thereby justifying all kinds of force against the individual. I vehemently disagree with this fundamental belief - and will argue against it - against the principle - anywhere it creeps up. There is no compromise when the compromise is between individual rights and abrogation of those rights - for it does not reflect a true compromise - only a benefit to some, a loss to others.

Not at all. Recognizing where you’re coming from in principle adds clarity and perspective. Again - if you’d like to have a rational discussion on this subject - lets start on why you implicitly believe educational services is a human right - and we’ll take it from there.

Yes. I realize that you believe you can advocate just a couple of socialist policies here and there, and still believe you’re an advocate for capitalism. The tragic problem there, is that your belief is relatively ubiquitous these days. The fundamental problem with that belief is that it demonstrates a complete lack of what capitalism is - an economic derivative of a larger underlying philosophy rooted in the primacy of individual rights. Where you drop a socialist policy in - you introduce direct and glaring contradictions. You can’t declare an economic product, like education, healthcare, etc. to be a human right when by their nature, those products must be produced by other human beings before they can be realized as “rights”. Accordingly, the government must either choose to violate the rights of the producers by forcing them to produce/serve - or - they can indirectly force the production through theft - taxation meant to pay for the production - whether or not some of those individuals that you’re taxing want to support that production or not. In which case, those individuals’ rights are violated.

I’ve had some interesting conversations with Faust on this - and this debate rightly resides in the core metaphysical assumptions that we hold regarding ones’ position on the right to life and property. However, if you truly believe in the individual right to life, and its extension, the right to property - then attempting to introduce socialist policies reflects necessary contradiction in application and an abrogation of individual rights for the sake of the socialist policies.

Again, there can be no compromise between two positions that are mutually exclusive in principle - there is no compromise. Only gains by one at the expense of the other. That is not compromise.

Want to start another thread? It’s a rather big discussion - and while I do agree with your evaluation of the impact of the Glass Steagall repeal - the issue goes much deeper and farther back than that.

Their safety record is phenomenal. And the failsafe mechanisms that were in place - and there were a number - did fail. Even in a car accident, regardless of the safety features involved - on the rare occasion that a Mack (18-wheeler) runs head on into you - it’s an accident and there’s no walking away from it. Should we all cry out and demand that auto manufacturers be forced to build tanks for cars? Based on your “logic” - yes - we should - as clearly, if the Mack truck flattens the car despite all of the crumple zones and reinforced fibres… the safety mechanisms have failed and something “must” be done.

I disagree with your reasoning.

And again, I understand where you’re coming from, but disagree with your premise. Emerging technologies where legislators are willing to get the government involved, become targets for bribes and “incentives” to subsidize and augment otherwise unprofitable ventures simply because a few people have “declared” the project/emerging tech as important to “the public good”.

If something was actually that important to the public good, implying that the demand was staggeringly high – why again could an entrepreneur not make a profit on it?

11

Government education is an inherently terrible idea. So is for-profit education. Each idea possesses flaws which, in the context of a growing and huge beauracratic society, perpetuate until the education systems becomes unstable and inefficient. Education can only function effectively in a small locale, and one not burdened by scarcity of resources. Which means, it can only function well for a limited period of time, and only conditionally. In principle, education ought to be done by the family, if we are to look at it efficiently, but of course thats a worse idea than either government or for-profit education.

The concept of massive state-wide systems of education, be it for-profit or government, include necessarily the functions of waste, inefficiency, and growing instability and lowering of standards. Its just built into the concept, theres no way around it.

Basically, theres no good or easy answer.

Dairdo,

As Ive said before, thank God youre here.

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Maybe we’re just going to have to let this go because I see you arguing the ideology and the label and insisting its importance. I don’t really mind what the label is and I don’t have any political allegiances. Each policy and argument needs to be assessed on it own merits and in context, rather than an ideological or fundamental opposition. I didn’t say it’s a human right, I’m not arguing rights. I’m saying that it’s important to have education because of the benefits to industry and society. The state needs to nourish a competitive employment pool to maintain its national competitiveness. By charging 50k a year per student for tuition alone, you’re seriously limiting your ability to attract talent. You’re stuck recruiting not the brightest, but the richest. There’s clear disadvantages there. I see no contradictions in the social and political systems of England and Europe. Socialist countries consistently have the highest rates of citizen satisfaction in the world. Not having to see a noticeable number of people doing hard drugs, women forced into prostitution because of economic constraints, high crime, and the various other consequences of poor wealth distribution, is worth paying higher taxes. Furthermore, if the satisfaction rates are anything to go by, clearly not many people think taxation is ‘theft’. This is a very American idea. As another member on this board said, having 1m in Europe is worth more (to a lot of people) than having 10m in Angola.
Look at the correlation between Gini coefficient and satisfaction. Countries with some kind of social welfare system are generally happier (Australia’s in there too, good income distribution and high happiness):

There’s the Economist, which isn’t a left wing source by any means, as well as the various analyses and literature all indicating that poor regulation was a key cause. I’m interested in seeing what you have to say, but only as long as there’s credible sources to reference, and not just ideological or philosophical positions.

The reason cars don’t resist trucks is that the costs would not justify the benefits. There’s simply far too many cars, and far too few truck deaths in comparison. The issue here is that the cost of an extra safety valve would be minimal, but the impact of the failure of the existing valve potentially catastrophic. You’ll have to refer me to the “[various] failsafe mechanisms” that were in place, as the Reuters article mentions only a shutter valve.

As mentioned before, there’s no carbon price at the moment. People do good things only as long as they’re not harmed too much. Paying 30k for a small wind turbine is a lot, so the government has to ensure enough incentives exist to provide a reasonable return on the purchase. The customer is still taking all the risk (e.g. if the product doesn’t perform, they won’t get reasonable return on investment), so clearly they are interested in buying it. As with the PV article I mentioned, prices are consistently falling as the technology matures. The incentives need to be put in place because the market won’t care if you have to pay 30c/kwh, that’s just how it is. The government however, does have a duty to ensure that your standards of living are maintained. There’s a bit of investment now, with the potential to avoid high price hikes in the future through diversification and dencetralization of the grid. Again, looking at cost benefit here, the benefits outweigh the costs very clearly.

And you said somewhere before that nothing good has come of government programs. The internet, through which we’re communicating, was a government program. Velcro was only adopted after the space program, a government program. The entire area of aerospace owes its development to government advocacy, from the jet engine to supersonic travel. Biofuels are being vigorously researched by the US government, with strong potential to make economically and technically viable fuel. The government may not be the most efficient tool at times, but because of its capital base, it has the ability to ‘cheat’ the market by pushing through expensive research that makes social rather than commercial sense.

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For better or worse, higher education is very big business.

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Rouz: I see so much confusion and contradiction in the above paragraph that I agree, we will be unable to continue this conversation. I can not argue with your feelings.

Start another thread with some specific questions and some sources that you’ve read? The Economist is one of my primary popup homepages in my browser (Google Chromse :slight_smile:) - and I assure you - not ever essay or columnist at the Economist agrees with what you’ve posted.

You originlaly stated that TransOcean’s near perfect safety record didn’t amount to anything - since this time - a serious accident happened. My example was not directed at the cost-benefit relationship - it was meant to illustrate your irrational position - in that regardless of how safe an endeavour may be - accidents can and will happen despite all of the best regulations in the world. Perspective.

As to the shutter valve - I took a quick look for your Reuters article and couldn’t find it. Only found this one at the WSJ: online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 … whats_news

It discusses the process of drilling, capping, etc etc etc. and what may or may not have happened.

With respect to the safety mechanisms - you can do a simple google search for safety & offshore drilling rigs. At every step along the way, there are countless, redundant failsafes that, apparently, failed completely where historically, they’ve worked to prevent an explosion and sinking of this kind. The point - again - is that accidents can and will happen, despite however “minimal” you believe certain safety mechanisms may be in hindsight.

As mentioned before, there’s no carbon price at the moment. People do good things only as long as they’re not harmed too much. Paying 30k for a small wind turbine is a lot, so the government has to ensure enough incentives exist to provide a reasonable return on the purchase. The customer is still taking all the risk (e.g. if the product doesn’t perform, they won’t get reasonable return on investment), so clearly they are interested in buying it. As with the PV article I mentioned, prices are consistently falling as the technology matures. The incentives need to be put in place because the market won’t care if you have to pay 30c/kwh, that’s just how it is.
[/quote]
Doesn’t really answer my question…

Says who?

You’re simply misinterpreting the facts. Yes, the original decentralized infrastructure of what we now call the internet was developed as a military project (government) in the US. Agreed. If you think the internet as it exists today is the result of governments, you’d be mistaken.

My point was not that governments - when acting in their proper function - can’t produce some incredible benefits. It’s that when the government attempts to act outside of its proper function by directly injecting interference and market distorting forces into economies - do bad things, always, happen.

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Dairdo I’m going to be a bit tied up until the beginning of next week so sorry for the delay in the response but I’d like to continue the conversation so please check back then. In the meantime, if you look at the Economist’s February 13th issue which has a special on financial risk, you’ll see them highlighting several issues under the article “Fingers in the dike: What regulators should do now”. They are the issues of “too big to fail”, “overhauling capital requirements” and “improving macroprudential regulation”. It’s a pretty big article and it has an interesting graph on banks’ capital ratios, with the US going from 25% in 1880 to 6-7% by 2000. There is similarly another article on the default rates of CDO’s, with each rating’s actual default rate being about 70-100 times worse than the expected default rate. The problem is raised in yet another article from the same issue, “Blocking out the sirens’ song: Moneymen need saving from themselves”. Just skimmed through it and saw this sentence after some criticism of specific regulation, “Most would agree, however, that markets need both tighter rules and better enforcement”.

This is in addition to the various analyses available from the BBC/Reuters/Times (also a more conservative paper) etc. I have a number of world class professors with whom I’ve discussed the crisis, traders I’ve met who work in the City and the 2 or 3 books written by traders/bankers after the crisis (e.g. Lehman Brothers Collapse/Big Short: Inside Doomsday which I’m just starting). David Einhorn’s book on Alliance Capital highlights several other issues related to poor/handsoff regulation which are shared with the events of the crisis, the most obvious being the link between loan VOLUME (rather than loan QUALITY) and staff bonuses (also going back to those loan originators bearing zero risk and essentially handing money out). Anyways, I spent more time than I should have but I think you’ll see that the general consensus is indeed that tighter regulation is necessary, and that the previous regulatory regime was clearly inadequate as exposed by the rapid collapse of Merril Lynch/Bear Stearns/Lehman and the huge losses at Citi/AIG/BofAmerica.

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Here I am! Did you read those articles/that edition?

I had a strong emphasis on cost benefit, I said specifically that “it would’ve been better to spend 2bn to implement more safety mechanisms rather than spend 7bn [in the aftermath]”. Other safety mechanisms, however numerous, may have no relation to this particular failure. I also stated the importance of failure mode identification and risk mitigation. The claim was that the risk was either underestimated or poor safety mechanisms put in place. The article you posted echoes the Reuters article by referring to “a set of valves”, a blowout preventer, that failed. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at a systems analysis chart for, say, a nuclear plant. The number of safety mechanisms is astounding. The reason is to make the risk of meltdown in a new plant near to 1/100k years or some really high number. In this case, the safety mechanisms weren’t put to a commercially and politically acceptable standard due to poor risk estimation.

A friend worked for BP for a year at a plant and the safety culture was so strong that they were not allowed to climb stairs without holding the handles, lest the manager note it down for a caution. So I’m not suggesting anything amazing or radical, or that they’re a neglectful company. As I see it, they either underestimated the risk, or they didn’t take appropriate strategies to deal with it. I think the events and the escalating costs are sound evidence for that. I think this is another position where I’ve said all that I wanted to say.

I did answer it. Energy security and price stability are not short term phenomena. The market isn’t exactly known for being a long term planner. Again, look at the price of oil in the past 5 years. Electricity usage and transport are growing continuously. This increases reliance on fossil fuels to feed them. This increases reliance on unstable countries like Iran and Venezuela. This has a negative impact on those countries’ economies and potentially regional stability, funding illicit activities. People, aware of the impact of uncontrolled fossil fuel reliance and the environmental cost, like green energy. It is too expensive now for people to buy it. The scale is tipped in fossil fuels’ favour because their environmental impact isn’t reflected in their price. Governments need to step in to ensure the technology matures. The article I provided shows evidence of one such example, solar PV, which is already commercially competitive with fossil fuels in certain places and is on a downward cost trajectory.

Say the voters who vote for any government that promises economic prosperity. Say the advanced economies of Western countries, all of which have a social safety net in the form of welfare.

The world economy is only recovering now due to government interference. We can point to 1929 for another similar event where lack of government interference had a very negative impact on the economy. Unemployment figures are encouraging relative to the potential impact of the crisis .

But it seems that we have a more basic and fundamental disagreement on the role of the government. I think it plays a regulatory and stabilizing role and has a social responsibility to its nation which is paid for through taxes. You disagree. I think the fact that the countries with the most satisfied people tend to have the least class gap, and the highest taxes naturally, is enough justification for my position. I’ve lived in countries with noticeable income disparities and it’s not nice seeing little homeless kids come up to you at every traffic stop trying to sell you something useless. Of course, in a truly capitalist society, kids like that would have no access to a decent environment/education/etc, which only in turn makes the problem worse and hereditary. To me, not seeing examples like that everyday is worth paying taxes, though of course that’s only the social aspect neglecting all the benefits that a stable government with efficient taxation has on bond prices/price stability/economic growth and all the other factors, the importance of which can now be seen in Greece.

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Ive been swamped all weekend - and haven’t had the chance to follow up on those articles yet. I have a sneaking suspicion I may have already read a few of them… but I’ll get to them.

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Do get back Dairdo, I’d like to see us reach some kind of conclusion or at least a recognition of where our differences lead to different conclusions

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<More money faster!>

I really think if I wasn’t required to take as many credits, I would have learned more. Information overload is not conducive to learning. But more credits = more income for the universities.

20

That really isn’t true, which is why universities haven’t adopted that system. Tuition is certainly nice, but the real gravy comes from grants earned by faculty members. Universities normally skim a pretty substantial part of the cream off that milkshake in order to pay for their operating budget. That is why med schools are tauted as an important part of a university despite the fact that it costs the university more to put each student through med school (leaving those who drop out aside!) than they earn in tuition. And med school tuition ain’t cheap! Med school faculty, however, those are the people that get those sweet NIH grants. Lots and lots of money.

But that money exists because those faculty are doing research worth funding (universities may have a hard time dumping tenured faculty members but governmental funding programs don’t give a shit – theoretically at least. Institutional bias is very much a problem but they are working on that. But that has nothing to do with individual researchers). When does the real work, the work that pays for the university’s existence, get done? When the faculty aren’t spinning their wheels teaching. At least, those are particularly fecund times. That doesn’t mean that teaching isn’t an important job, it is. But that isn’t and oughtn’t be the primary job of tenured professors. And you’ll note that at institutions worth going to, it isn’t. If you want one-on-one experience with an excellent teacher with a good understanding of pedagogy, go to a college or “university” that is a step-or-two above community college. If you want to be taught by someone at the top of their field at a top-of-the-line institution, know that teaching is, at best, a third-ranked priority on behalf of the faculty worth taking about.