Is geographic education the next financial bubble?

摘要

Since the first publicly-supported university opened in the United States, more than 200 years ago, public higher education has been viewed as a public good. Until recently, the resulting ethos was to keep tuition as low as possible and so enhance opportunity for all. However, over the past thirty years public higher education has undergone a fundamental change. Given our focus on the enhanced earning power for those possessing a college or university degree, we have now come to view and market higher education as a private benefit. The result is that most state-supported institutions now receive only a small portion of their annual revenue from state coffers, depending instead on tuition, typically paid through student loans. In some cases the proportion of state support for total university budgets has fallen to less than ten percent of the total. Some might say that this transformation from public good to private benefit is, in the long run, in the best interests of institutions, who direct their efforts towards programs for which students are willing to pay, and of students themselves, who receive marketable skills, which they will parlay into incomes to repay the loans that funded their educations. Why should this fundamental change in the financing of public higher education be of concern to geographers?