In a May 1 column in The Oklahoman, University of Oklahoma president David Boren sent up a loud cry of “Wolf!” over the prospect that Oklahoma may do what quite a few other states are doing – shifting some of the burden of paying for the state university system from the taxpayers to students and other parties who are willing to donate money. Mr. Boren finds this “alarming” because it “threatens to close the door of opportunity.”
Paul Krugman is a columnist who never passes up an opportunity to throw jabs at those Americans whom he dislikes, a set that comprises anyone who doesn’t accept his big-government philosophy. All the jabbing would be fine if Krugman limited himself to serious arguments, but serious arguments might be too boring for his New York Times editors, so he often resorts to cheap shots and fallacious reasoning. His April 5, 2005 column “An Academic Question” is a case in point. (Site requires registration.)
“No one spends other people’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” So says Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. Let’s keep that in mind as we consider a new spending proposal being pushed by one of the schools in the UNC system.
The University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNC-P) has advanced a plan to build a new school of optometry at the geographically remote campus. The budget contains $10 million for the initial planning and development of the project, but no funds can be expended until the UNC president’s office gives approval. A meeting to decide on the plan is scheduled for later this month.
Richard Vedder: Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much; American Enterprise Institute; 2004; 232 pp.; $25 It is incontestably true the cost of going to college has been…
It is incontestably true the cost of going to college has been steadily climbing for decades. Tuition, mandatory student fees (which compel students to pay for a lot of…
A recent paper entitled “The Investment Payoff” purports to identify a number of significant benefits from higher education – increased personal income, lower unemployment, improved health, reduced reliance on public assistance, more volunteerism, and increased electoral participation. Readers are subtly led to conclude that increased spending on higher education would mean more of those desirable benefits. The weakness of the paper, however, is that it merely shows correlations between the group of college degree holders and the favorable outcomes. Policy makers should not be swayed by “The Investment Payoff” into putting additional resources into higher education.
One of the most important lessons anyone can learn about politics is that when government sets out to accomplish some objective, it often winds up doing the opposite. Rent control laws, for example, are supposed to help the non-wealthy who want urban housing, but the effect of rent control is to diminish both the quantity and quality of rental housing available.
With that point in mind, let’s consider federal student aid programs. Congress has established a variety of grant and loan programs (budgeted this year at some $73 billion) which were supposed to help make college more affordable to millions of non-wealthy families. As the cost of attending college has risen, politicians have increased the amount of aid available. The trouble is that by doing so, the government gives colleges an incentive to further increase tuition charges.
Just three months after his campaign to become the Vice President of the United States ended, former Senator John Edwards has been given a new job that seems designed to keep him, at least occasionally, in the public eye.
Edwards is going to become the Director of a new organization called the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity (CPWO for short) that will officially be a part of the Law School at UNC-Chapel Hill. His title will be University Professor. He will give occasional guest lectures and do whatever directing the CPWO entails. For that work, he’ll be paid $40,000 annually. That’s a lot less than a senator is paid, but money is really no object for the millionaire lawyer.
Near the very end of the 2003 legislative session, the General Assembly passed a new law that gives to all graduates of the North Carolina School for Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) a tuition waiver if they enroll in any of the campuses of the UNC system. With tuition charges going as high as $4,400 (at Chapel Hill), this policy is a substantial yearly saving for those families whose children graduate from NCSSM and then choose one of the UNC campuses.
Since the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) opened in 1980, the school has attracted some of the state’s top high school students to come to Durham study at the residential high school. At the school, students take college-level courses, and they have performed well on SAT tests and in national competitions and been admitted to some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. In recognition of the school’s generally high level of academic achievement, in 2003 the General Assembly instituted a policy of waiving tuition charges for NCSSM graduates who enroll in any University of North Carolina institution. That policy, however, cannot be justified by any of the arguments advanced in its favor. It produces no public benefit, costs the state money, and unfairly discriminates in favor of NCSSM graduates.