Phoenix Online provides a very good counterexample to your belief that
"A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience."
Consumers make bad choices. They do so frequently. Besides there is a moral aspect to this.
Suppose a school is very bad. People discover this and go to a competitor school. In the time it takes for people to wise up to the school's terribleness damage has been done to society. I don't see how the free market would be any better at determining this than the current system in the U.S.
As to healthcare; think cartels. What there is no choice for consumers to choose a provider that doesn't "try to bend them over backwards for their own bottom-line"?
One of the things a free-market education system would offer is competition on reputation - allowing customers to choose schools before ever going there based on short feedback loops of many individual customers attending and reporting. This is already done with the public-private college system we have now - and yet you argue it's not possible to determine the quality of a school without going there, finding out it's bad and then being damaged?
If you don't understand how markets better allocate resources than top down rationing systems I suggest you go take economics at the nearest community college.
One of the concepts in the micro-economics principles class you will learn is that education has positive external benefits (beyond the market). In other words there is a marginal social benefit to education that exceeds the market demand. The best way to address this is not to have public school system monopolies of supply and take the cost to near zero - a much more efficient mechanism is to harness (superior) market resource allocation through demand subsidies.
>If you don't understand how markets better allocate resources
better for what? If you study the economics, you'd know that free market naturally results in the outcomes like "food deserts" and 10%+ uninsured precisely because markets better allocate resources for profit maximization, not for universal coverage (which is a main objective of the public education system and must be, for basic human decency and net positive economical result for the whole society, made an objective of the healthcare system)
The sentence you quoted is poorly phrased, but taken with its following sentence as a whole the meaning is still there.
"A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience. Schools that provide the best long-term experience for the students will have the best profits, no shady practices required."
The reason why the first sentence is poorly phrased is because the second sentence says in effect "if a school really has profitability as a goal, it will naturally avoid shady practices because otherwise it will be destroyed." It's a classic example of short-term vs. long-term decision-making, and in this case suggesting that long-term profitability requires that no shady practices are used for long and will beat out short-term profitability employing shady practices.
It's not a towering argument in favor of free market education, but I'm not sure that University of Phoenix is a counterexample. Do you have more information on this? My understanding was that their main evilness is taking advantage of the public non-free-market federal student loans business to get more students and money instead of lowering their prices, which is what some say would happen if you took the government out of the equation for public and private loan backing.
My own view is that education costs are tightly tied to the school brand first (which includes the most general brand of being able to say you're college-educated anywhere, which is very important for many jobs and shouldn't be (the knowledge yes, not the "spent time at this location with these people" part)), administrators next, then professors, and the actual knowledge somewhere further down near the bottom. MIT's OCW is just one of many places showing you're not paying for the information, but for status, facilities, and someone to help you learn. So education costs aren't so much a public/private or profit/non-profit problem but a cultural one.
Comments
Phoenix Online provides a very good counterexample to your belief that
"A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience."
Consumers make bad choices. They do so frequently. Besides there is a moral aspect to this.
Suppose a school is very bad. People discover this and go to a competitor school. In the time it takes for people to wise up to the school's terribleness damage has been done to society. I don't see how the free market would be any better at determining this than the current system in the U.S.
As to healthcare; think cartels. What there is no choice for consumers to choose a provider that doesn't "try to bend them over backwards for their own bottom-line"?
One of the things a free-market education system would offer is competition on reputation - allowing customers to choose schools before ever going there based on short feedback loops of many individual customers attending and reporting. This is already done with the public-private college system we have now - and yet you argue it's not possible to determine the quality of a school without going there, finding out it's bad and then being damaged?
If you don't understand how markets better allocate resources than top down rationing systems I suggest you go take economics at the nearest community college.
One of the concepts in the micro-economics principles class you will learn is that education has positive external benefits (beyond the market). In other words there is a marginal social benefit to education that exceeds the market demand. The best way to address this is not to have public school system monopolies of supply and take the cost to near zero - a much more efficient mechanism is to harness (superior) market resource allocation through demand subsidies.
>If you don't understand how markets better allocate resources
better for what? If you study the economics, you'd know that free market naturally results in the outcomes like "food deserts" and 10%+ uninsured precisely because markets better allocate resources for profit maximization, not for universal coverage (which is a main objective of the public education system and must be, for basic human decency and net positive economical result for the whole society, made an objective of the healthcare system)
The sentence you quoted is poorly phrased, but taken with its following sentence as a whole the meaning is still there.
"A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience. Schools that provide the best long-term experience for the students will have the best profits, no shady practices required."
The reason why the first sentence is poorly phrased is because the second sentence says in effect "if a school really has profitability as a goal, it will naturally avoid shady practices because otherwise it will be destroyed." It's a classic example of short-term vs. long-term decision-making, and in this case suggesting that long-term profitability requires that no shady practices are used for long and will beat out short-term profitability employing shady practices.
It's not a towering argument in favor of free market education, but I'm not sure that University of Phoenix is a counterexample. Do you have more information on this? My understanding was that their main evilness is taking advantage of the public non-free-market federal student loans business to get more students and money instead of lowering their prices, which is what some say would happen if you took the government out of the equation for public and private loan backing.
My own view is that education costs are tightly tied to the school brand first (which includes the most general brand of being able to say you're college-educated anywhere, which is very important for many jobs and shouldn't be (the knowledge yes, not the "spent time at this location with these people" part)), administrators next, then professors, and the actual knowledge somewhere further down near the bottom. MIT's OCW is just one of many places showing you're not paying for the information, but for status, facilities, and someone to help you learn. So education costs aren't so much a public/private or profit/non-profit problem but a cultural one.