Right of Education

The conservatives in the United States have not been nearly as vocal about their beliefs regarding the higher education system.  However, a lot of their views can be gleaned through looking at the legislation they pass and their policies when in power.  The vast majority of it is pretty expected.  They pass laws reducing government funding of public K-12 and public colleges/universities.  The goal being to reduce government’s role in the system.

The most radical of the conservatives would argue that the government should not be providing education to the public, and that it should be provided, and maintained, by the free market.  The principle argument is that if the schools make themselves too expensive students will not attend because it is affordable.  If the schools are run privately, yes they could charge whatever they wanted to, but they would also have to be competitive.  This not only applies to the cost but to the quality of the education.  By privatizing the system it would allow for greater competition and choice.  It would potentially eliminate exorbitant out of state tuition because the state isn’t paying, and it would bring a better balance between cost and quality.

The more “mainstream” policy stance among conservatives is the desire to reduce federal college loans and instead replace them with insured private loans.  This could create greater transparency in the system and allow students and their parents to make a more informed decision when deciding to take a loan and how much they will borrow.  It also gives them a choice of where they can borrow which would lead to competitive interest rates.  The goal in the end is to greatly reduce, or remove, the government cost of education.  This shift would, in a way similar to privatizing the schools entirely, allow for the free market to decide how students will pay for their school and by changing the availability of funding, it could potentially reduce the overall cost of the education.  They also believe that there should be a higher focus on community college and trade schools built around job specific skills that would better lend themselves directly to a profession.

Most liberals would have essentially the same argument for both plans.  The free market would not result in an equal outcome.  For the extreme policy they would insist that because corporations and people are built specifically to make a profit, the quality of the education would suffer.  Because they would be trying to make the most money possible, they would likely hire substandard teachers because they could be paid less and hike up tuition to increase the bottom line.  They would argue against both points in the second proposal for many of the same reasons.  By privatizing the loans it would allow for less regulation of interest rates and allow more predatory lending.  It would also reduce access to the funding that many families rely on to send their children to school.  They would speculate reducing the access to education it would reduce the ability to pay for the next generation’s access down the line and nearly kill off upward mobility in the economy for lower class families.