Who needs an education?

Greg Byrne
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 2 February 2009

With the start of the school year it might be useful to reflect upon the unwarranted intrusion of compulsory schooling on families. After the Vietnam War both sides of Australian politics tacitly agreed that conscription for national service would never be used again unless there was a dire needs for it. Yet here we are in 2009 after the introduction of videos, Internet and successful experimentation in homeschooling with governments still demanding that children attend school regularly for at least eight years.

Many years ago economist Colin Clark was highly critical of governments providing free or even subsidised higher education. He then went on to question whether or not any education should be free or subsidised. In a highly critical article in the old Melbourne Herald in 1980 he said that he would close half of the universities in Australia and Britain and three quarters in America. Clark later wrote that educational credentials were merely filtering devices for personnel managers and that the costs to taxpayers were large.

Since that time there has developed a large class of so-called educated people who have had to take jobs that pay little more than their parents’ jobs did, even though they had no tertiary qualifications. (I think there is a need to distinguish between being educated and receiving specialised training in a subject, i,e., computer science ).

Ultimately, the best job you can do is the best job you can get and that might mean sorting mail in the mail exchange, waiting on tables, serving in a shop and so on. We can be critical of educational standards today. There is no doubt that something needs to be done. In my own course in engineering I can point to quite a few basic things that could have been drastically improved.

But even if these changes were made and even if courses were highly relevant at the end of the day it comes down to what jobs are available in the market. I have no doubt that the Rudd Government will be under pressure to help young people get real jobs when its honeymoon period is over. That will lead to a demand for better standards and more relevant courses but it will make little difference because ultimately it’s all part of a filtering process.

At the end of the day jobs come down to labour market regulation and the ability of employers to operate businesses without fear of interference from governments or trade unions. The best place to learn a job is on the job. The recommendations of Clark i.e. that governments cease funding higher education would leave open the question of people paying full fees and universities operating on a fee for service basis.

In fact since that article there has been a trend in that direction with HECS. About eight years ago a talk show on ABC radio discussed HECS which is the Australian scheme for students repaying tuition fees via taxation. During the show one expert said that if anyone thinks HECS is bad it is far better than anything in North American or Western Europe where students take out real loans and pay real interest.

We would welcome this development (students paying full fees) as being in the student’s best interest as well as taxpayers’ best interest. If staff had to satisfy paying customers they would cease acting like mandarins of a privileged class and provide value for money. University teaching is no different to any other industry where people pay for services and expect value for money. The same should apply to lower levels of education.

Advocates of open-ended education argue that it produces economic growth and raises wages. But as Brookesnews has explained innumerable times, economic growth is capital accumulation and it is this process and this process alone that raises wages for everyone.