Everyone wants to be like UVA
Marta Mossburg, a senior fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute, recently made an observation about higher ed funding in the Washington Examiner that echoes the recommendations made in NPRI's Freedom Budget.
Mossburg recognizes that large state subsidies have retarded the quality of education being offered at UMD - College Park. Across the river at UVA, where state funding was cut to 8.2 percent of the budget in the 1990s, the university's national ranking has risen to #2 among all public universities.
Forget for the moment that subsidized higher education is a regressive wealth transfer that forces low-income families to finance the education of children from higher-income families who will go on to become doctors and lawyers. Forget for the moment that this transfer limits socioeconomic mobility instead of facilitating it.
Just look what happened to the quality of education offered.
Higher education exists to endow students with a skill set that they can use to elevate their earnings potential. Schools that are more able to do this are in higher demand and individuals are more willing to pay for that education. If an individual is unwilling to pay the full price of attending a school, it is indicative of the fact that they've determined the educational quality offered to be less valuable than the cost of attendance.
Legislatures in most states have asked taxpayers to step in and fill that gap at their subsidized schools. Hence, taxpayers are required to fund an institution that lawmakers have implicitly acknowledged isn't doing its job up to market standards.
State lawmakers in Virginia recognized this economic reality long ago and curtailed funding to the state's schools while expanding their autonomy from the state - a plan similar to what NPRI has recommended in its Freedom Budget. The result? The schools were forced to elevate their curricula to a level that would merit the private investment of individuals.
Nevada currently has no top ranked schools and the degree of subsidization is the primary cause of that. Currently, the top high school students from Nevada are forced to go out of state to universities like Stanford or USC in order to receive an elite level of education.
The plan outlined in the Freedom Budget would instead allow the state's two flagship universities to elevate their own curricula and compete on the market to achieve elite status in the way that UVA has. This would expand the educational opportunities available in the Silver State allow for the elusive "economic diversification" that state lawmakers are always crowing about.
