Bailey, Michael , Mark Carl Rom, and Matthew M. Taylor. "State competition in higher education: A race to the top, or a race to the bottom?." Economics of Governance 5 (2002): 53-75. Print.
This reading goes about describing the effects of competition between institutions on the price of admissions. The reading looks into all of the possible scenarios that can come from competition and also the compares public and private institutions. During it's comparison this reading goes on to describe how the two (public and private) have exchanged aspects of each others ways. The reading also goes on to state that public institutions are re-distributive while privates are very tuition based.
Michael Bailey has a Ph.D in education from Stanford University. According to his self-written bio on the webpage of Georgetown University Bailey, teaches and conducts research on American politics and political economy. His work covers trade, congress, election law and the Supreme Court, methodology and inter-state policy competition.
A key concept within this reading is to show through graphs and objective ways how state institutions are re-distributive while on the contrary the concept for private schools is that they tend to compete more so on the basis of tuition.
"Education is an investment. The trouble is, they [universities] don’t run it
like an investment over there ... they run it like welfare ... (pg 54)." This implies that perhaps the reason that, when investing, the reception does not equal the time and debt put it in is because colleges don't even treat as an investment. This suggests that colleges and the people aren't even on the same wavelength and for that reason the student is swindled from the start. "His investigation focuses on the idea that political control over universities will lead to lower tuitions and broader enrollments (policies favored by elected politicians); in contrast, university control over policy will lead to higher tuitions and smaller enrollments (policies favored by faculty and university administrators) (pg. 55)." This quote is very significant because it proves the fact that when public institutions have less and less government authority they raise prices and smaller enrollments. That is a direct repercussion of self-interest, the raise in prices is to compensate for the smaller enrollment and to redistribute and the smaller enrollment is to make the university more selective to raise rankings. The mission of the university shifted when the government authority lessened. The quote also shows the versus environment of the state and university.
"The diffusion literature focuses on the likelihood that states will adopt the policy innovations implemented by other states. The conventional view is that states are more likely to adopt some innovation if their neighbors have previously adopted it (pg. 55)." This quote helps show that the reason higher education isn't a bigger political issue could just be because nobody else is doing it. It's kind of like statehood peer pressure. Whichever state takes the step to fix higher education will be a forerunner and perhaps cause a domino effect throughout the United States. It will only take one state to make higher education a serious political issue.
This material helped me explore my research question by showing me how the public and private schools function with the income they obtain and how they compare, it also gave me objective and mathematical backing when it comes to university self-interest versus government backed universities.
Chisa --
ReplyDeleteI had to go read this article (easy to find online -- though I wish you'd include the link to it in your citation) because you have not done a good job of summarizing its conclusions, though I think the basic implication you draw (that it just takes one state to bring about change) is potentially interesting, if quite tangental to the overall thrust of the article. You seem set on making an argument that we need political will to make change, but this article hardly gives you good evidence. I think you need a much stronger piece to help you make your case, and you need to deal with the basic material issues that this essay and our reading from Bob Meister both discuss. Because, in the end, it comes down to economics -- which always drives politics (and not the other way around).
When you discuss this essay in your paper, you should explain why it is that the price competition seen among private schools does not apply to publics. Why would public colleges and their states want to charge more and pay less? I think you could put this in dialogue with Meister's argument that puts the blame on public school administrators for choosing privatization. The argument in this article is that states are silently conspiring with each other, like a cartel, to raise rates and lower costs. That makes sense.
How do you break the cartel? should be your question. After all, why would a single state choose to break with the cartel when the cartel effect is a benefit for states, because there is no competition. How do you introduce competition?
That should be your question: how do you introduce price competition?