Is education a commodity or a public good?
I'm not convinced that education
is either commodity (fully fungible privately owned good) or a public good
(owned by all, commonly enjoyed benefits). BOTH ideas have significant faults
and BOTH are misleading.
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| Individually quality assured. |
I'm uncomfortable with education being "public"
because the graduate is the person who privately extracts the most benefit from
the education in the form of higher wages. People don't endure accounting
degrees because they love it, they do it for purely selfish reasons such as
employment. Sure public benefits from education, but that doesn't make it a
public good. The public benefits from Cole or Woolies because we don't stave,
but that doesn't mean selling food is a public good. Education is also
experiential (not a physical good), it's a deeply personal thing.
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Sometimes, we handle iron ore with
more care than we do our students. |
Nor is education a commodity. The “commodity” tag implies that
you can just beat things down on price because it’s all “about the same”, but high
end talent isn’t really like that. Commodities are bought (not earned), and you
can always own infinitely more of the stuff. So, you don’t really “own”
education, but nor can we say that it’s publicly “owned” either. Education is limited
to lifespans, memory loss, attention spans. There is really only so much you
can do with 24 hours (unless there’s 25+hours in your day). Further, public
goods (like beaches, air, safe environments) are consumed without any effort. Conversely,
it takes are fair whack of effort to both get an education, and yet more effort
to actually use the knowledge in the community/workforce.
I’m sceptical of analogies, but here goes:
It might be better if we think of we re-think of education
as part of the “privately embodied infrastructure”. Education is more like a private toll bridge.
It goes somewhere that people want to go, and the provider can charge a price
for the public to use it. Many decide to give it away for free, others charge high
prices (think of the last time you had to use a medical specialist).
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I don't really care if you think of it as a
"public benefit " or not, but somebody has to pay. |
Sure, some people go to school so they can be doctors in
remote areas and willing chose to receive close to zero pay. But is totally
selfless altruism true of half of our students? Even 10%? I don’t think any of
my accounting grads enrolled because they felt that society would be better off
if we “protected investors by providing them with the most truthful and useful
information needs when choosing to allocate their resources” – yet that’s
exactly what accountants do! People engage in education at great personal expense
because it mostly yields private rewards. Positive effects on society is an
externality.
As educators, we are more like architects who show people
how to build their own infrastructure, but we cannot install it for them. When people pay tuition fees, they are buying themselves
opportunities. They are not buying a “thing”.
Education is a society building experience. I don’t believe it
is a commodity, nor is it a public good.
----------- Reviewer's commentary -----------
SELF CRITICISM: this argument presented above confuses “education”
as being “the process of getting an education” and “the state of being educated”. Phillip, Please re-draft your thesis and
resubmit.
-Tetracarbon out.
