What's the Matter with California

by Andrew Gillen

Michael O'Hare has an interesting post up about the philosophical issues concerning tuition

education consumes real economic resources, hence has a real cost no matter what its price… European experiments with zero-price education have not gone so well…Giving it away at the college level seems to signal for many students that it’s an entitlement, and delivered to them, rather than an opportunity to invest their own effort productively…

if we were setting up the system from scratch, there’s no reason it couldn’t be based on full-cost tuition, discounted by some estimate of the external benefits the educated provide to all of us...

as well as the particular changes happening in California.

a deal whereby generation t receives a big endowment of personal, social, and physical capital from generation (t-1) that enables it to consume lots of resources and have a happy life, while still adding to (and maintaining) that kind of capital to bequeath to generation (t+1). The current generation of California voters has broken that deal, realizing it would be even nicer for them to just consume everything they earn and leave my students to fend for themselves educationally and in lots of other ways. They are making the transition to full-price education quickly, ignorantly, and heartlessly…

what’s going on in California now is a vast looting of a trust fund, a violation of fiduciary and parental responsibility. It’s generation K for klepto running loose…