Links for 10/8/09

Elizabeth Bryan

Ending institutional grants would take the politics out of higher education and allow consumers (the students) to drive which investments universities make. College administrators would need to please enrollees, not lawmakers, to get additional funds.

Frederick M Hess

Rather than addressing the anti-competitive arrangements and cross-subsidies that have led colleges to profiteer at the expense of students, the administration is pushing to spend half a billion dollars to procure online courses that will be offered free of charge to all comers…

Duncan’s proposal is a profoundly short-term solution. If the federal government started freely offering large swaths of cell phone service, it would be difficult for providers to retain customers. The result would be the gradual erosion of the market place and reduced investment in new products or services. Short-term savings would be gained at the cost of gutting the sector’s ability to keep innovating and improving.

Kevin Carey takes some fire for daring to criticize Harvard. To me, most of it does little to address his main point:

In brief: From 1990 to 2008, the Harvard endowment grew by $30 billion. That’s more money than anyone could possibly have dreamed of. And yet in all that time, the people in charge of spending that money never thought to devote even a dime of it to educating more undergraduates. These seem like warped values for an educational institution.