Reply to The New America: Elite Privates forever out of reach for UMC?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The other thing is that the benefit of universities is not just to an individual that attends--the number of scientific discoveries that are required to be made public, the scholarship on key issues, policy and economic analyses.    
Sure some  academic scholarship may be arcane and esoteric, but in sum, universities have contributed a lot of to our understanding and functioning of the world.  They train the people who make the world run.  This idea of education as merely a private good, a private luxury is so problematic.

Private companies take that knowledge, design something based on it, patent it, keep it secret and charge a fortune.  Their R&D is highly protected while university researchers are required to share everything.  The US is getting a lot for it's fairly minimal investment in higher ed.[/quote]

True, but no reason that these need to be private. In most of the world the top universities are in the public sector.[/quote]

I think that the combination of top private and public universities in the US is critical to its competitive success.  That some schools aren't as subject to the whims of govt helps protect higher ed overall in the longterm.  The US has a really successful higher ed environment that is serving the country well in terms of research productivity, community advantages, education of students.  The issues I see are: the burden of the cost on the individual for both private and public and the resulting inequalities it creates, the tendency to view higher education as a private rather than a private and public good, and the de-investment in public education from state governments.   I think we should focus on that--the higher ed system in the US is an amazing resource--the number of quality schools across a large territory that serves a wide range of individuals is unmatched in the world--it is one of our greatest competitive resources if we manage it well.[/quote]

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