In a previous post (Price and cost in Higher Education: Price, Jan. 2007) I looked at some data on tuition price increases over time, and the resulting debt load that many students have taken on. In this post, I want to talk, once again, about the ongoing global transition from nation-states to a market-states (see Welcome to the Market-State,Feb. 20, 2006). In this instance, I will focus on how that transition might relate to price in higher education.
Bobbitt describes the governing contract of the nation state as: the government (the State) commits to improving the lives of its citizens (the Nation), and in return, the citizens agree to sacrifice to support the state. In the market state, the government only seeks to maximize the opportunity - rather than the welfare - of its citizens, and individuals then thrive or fail based on their ability to grasp the opportunities offered by the global marketplace. As a corollary, since the market state is offering less of a guarantee of success to the citizens than does the nation state, the citizens in the former are less prepared to sacrifice on behalf of the state. One consequence of this change is that there are increasing demands that tax loads decrease, with the result that the state has less revenue in a market state environment.
In the nation state, highly educated people across a broad spectrum of fields are considered to provide intellectual capital of great value to the state (see Metrics of Academic Excellence in the 21st century, Feb. 27, 2006). However, in a market state, the state focuses its attention on creating educated people in more narrowly defined fields that are deemed to be of importance in order to meed some perceived need of the state. Higher education overall is considered to be of primary value to the individual, rather than to the collective. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education survey captures the changing societal view of this public good/private good perspective. The survey showed that 2/3 of adult Americans now believe that families and students should pay the largest share of the costs of higher education. Similar surveys in the 1960s showed that most Americans believed the converse, that the federal government should pay the largest share of the costs of higher education. Thus the transition to a market state lowers the responsibility of government to take the lead in paying for higher education.
However, there is a counter trend contained in the market state that
gives the state a very large stake in higher education. As the knowledge
economy continues to expand, access to higher education becomes central
to the principle of maximized opportunity that undergirds the market
state contract. However, as we saw in Price and cost in Higher Education: Price, increasing price is decreasing access to higher education. As a consequence, the state needs to find ways to
counter the effects of increasing higher education price in order to maintain legitimacy. As a further constraint, it must do so without significantly increasing its costs of supporting what has
increasingly become a private benefit. And in any case, because of
its lowered tax collections, the state is greatly constrained in the
financial incentives that it could apply to increasing access even
should that be desirable.