Opinion #Economy

College Isn't A Public Good - Therefore Government Shouldn't Make It Free

, Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Not that we can make college free of course - at least not until all those professors and diversity advisers start turning up to work for free. All we can do is change who pays for it. Should it be the students who pay for it or the society in general and at large through the tax system? We should note that there is an economic argument that certain things really should be paid for, or at least subsidised, by that general taxation system. This is a class of goods that we call "public goods." The essential idea is that the benefits of private effort flow to the society at large - therefore the society at large should be paying for subsidising the production from those private efforts.

But do note that a public good is not something good for the public, it is not a good that the public consumes and it is not even something that the public would like to have. It's a very specific definition, a public good is something that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Newton's equations for example. Now that we've got them we can't stop people from using them. And any use of them doesn't diminish the amount available for other people to use. Your using them to send a rocket to the Moon (yes, Newton is good enough for this, we don't need Einstein's revisions) does not mean that there's a shortfall in my supply for that vital study of Kim Kardashian's hipsway.

When this is so we also find that it's difficult for someone to profit from having produced such an item. If we can't stop people from using something then we can't charge them for doing so. And thus we think that public goods will be undersupplied. This would be bad - the solution is for government to become involved.

However, we do need to be very clear that there is a public good involved and also that we've identified the correct one. For example, we're often told that vaccination is a public good - it isn't. Vaccination though is the method of gaining the public good which is herd immunity. If 95% of the population are vaccinated then there's nowhere for the disease to hide. Thus that last 5%, who cannot be vaccinated (depressed immune systems, babies etc) are protected.

Further, we do also need to identify the correct government reaction - it doesn't have to be subsidy. My native Britain achieves herd immunity by the government paying for all vaccinations. The US doesn't - but in general you don't get to send the little snotmachines to school until they have been vaccinated. The public good is achieved through government action, not necessarily subsidy.

We promote the production of invention and innovation through patents and copyrights - basic research like Cern with direct government grants.

That college or university should be free to those who go to it is a common lefty claim in both the US and UK. As with this:

This is why Jeremy Corbyn’s proposed national education service, even while its Maoist overtones are so strong, is so impressive. It starts with a principle that sounds like common sense: education is a public good.

No, it isn't. It's rivalrous and excludable. If I am on a degree course that's a place you cannot take. And it's entirely possible to attend lectures at Yale or Cambridge for the requisite number of years and find that the university won't grant you a degree. Thus education itself if not a public good.

But perhaps there is some other public good that is created by education? Adam Smith certainly thought so about primary schooling. Being part of a generally literate and numerate nation is perhaps a public good. But does college meet that standard? Opinions can differ here but I would say no. Certainly not at the level that 30 to 50% of the age cohort go to college.