Now operated under the private Corporation, Navient, this business now owns and manages more than $13 billion dollars of student loan. Or, to use another example, when the government facilitated the process by which private for-profit universities with \"the nation's highest dropout rates and the lowest graduation rates\" ([PERSON], p. 60) could access guaranteed loan money as well as Pell Grant funding from the federal government, it was easy to transfer such public resources to private educational corporations even though such for-profits put only 10% of their gross revenues into per-student academic costs (the rate is at least three times greater in public universities).  
Given this powerful project of converting higher education's public good into a private market commodity, we now have to examine some of the key economic rationales justifying these changes. The goal will be to contrast the myths with the realities. But here is the fundamental caveat: the ruling classes deeply prefer the myths, so our critical responsibility as educators is to resist the \"post-truth\" era and reveal the economic and educational realities that the public deserves to know. I want to begin by exposing the most common myth sustaining the privatization movement: the private market benefit of increased life-time earnings is the best and most accurate measure of educational value. Nothing could be further from the truth, although in its own narrow terms, it is certainly a well-documented fact that a college degree dramatically increases one's lifetime earnings. As [PERSON] explains, all the evidence confirms that while \"the real income of college graduates has risen 57% since 1980\" (ix), for the 64% of Americans who have not gone to college, actual income has not risen at all in the same period (elite CEO and administrative salaries have increased by a factor of about 4000%). Over a lifetime, college graduates can expect to earn 84% more than someone with only a high school diploma. So it is indeed true that in terms of simple, private market benefits, college pays. And everyone knows this because it is broadcast everywhere all the time: about 80% of Americans think \"a college education is essential in today's world\" ([PERSON], 2015, p. 42) even if they can't afford it. No argument there.  
The problem is that we have reduced our calculations of educational value exclusively to the direct private market value of the degree, as experienced by the college graduate. That is the capitalist plan: pay our own way and get what you earned (in principle). But in practice, this monovalent focus on private market value (to the exclusion of indirect and social benefits) forecloses, among many things, the ability to document the remarkable levels of market failure that have affected higher education. The most dramatic and thorough critique of this reductive private market rationale has been carried out by [PERSON]. [PERSON] in his 2009 book, _Higher learning, Greater Good: The Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education_([PERSON], 2009). To cut to the chase, [PERSON] identifies not _one_ marker of education value (direct, private market profit), but _six_ categories. Besides the identified market gains, he also includes in his economic analysis the non-market but nevertheless clearly economic benefits; the public/social as well as private/individual benefits; and the direct (short-term) vs. the indirect (mostly long-term) financial gains. The result of his analysis is a much more complete accounting for the full range of educational value.  
[PERSON]'s basic approach is to adapt [PERSON]'s widely circulated notion of \"human capital\" to the analysis of higher education, but [PERSON] opens a much wider analysis of some very real but non-market and indirect economic factors. In his famous 1964 book, _Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education_([PERSON], 1993), [PERSON] used complex mathematical formulae (they are almost completely incomprehensible to me, so it takes an experienced economist to make sense of them) to quantify human capital by contrasting the economic value added to those who had attended various levels of education. Although, as might be expected, I disagree with many of [PERSON]'s more conservative economic beliefs in de-regulated market economies as the best way to fulfill the promises of \"human capital,\" his influential book did indeed open the door for economists to include in their otherwise highly econometric analyses various non-market and indirect sources of value. [PERSON] further develops [PERSON]'s way of defining \"human capital\" as a concept for registering the economic significance of direct and indirect human skills and resources, and such indirect human benefits from higher education include, among many others, better health, greater longevity, and more civic participation. These are all long-term benefits; they accrue to broad ranges of the population so they are not necessarily confined to the elite (as they are now under the capitalist world-system that focuses on short-term profit-loss ratios). As forms of monetary as well as non-monetary benefits, these kinds of externalities can be both positive and negative, depending on your subject position within the nation. For most of the public, they are positive externalities calling for deep governmental funding as a human right; for private owners of capital they are negative externalities calling for higher and more progressive tax systems, and thus a drain on their short-term profit margin.  
The most striking thing about [PERSON]'s statistical evidence is that he devised ingenious ways of tabulating both market (direct and indirect) and nonmarket (direct and non-direct) monetary values for social as well as private economic benefits for most citizens. Now, I am very wary of the educationally reductive econometric measures that have so dominated the standardization, outcomes assessment, and cost-efficiency movements (so typical of neoliberal capitalism), so I tend to share [PERSON]'s wise admonition that \"Not everything that counts can be counted\" ([PERSON], 2012, p. 120), a good way of encapsulating the reservations many of us humanists have about bean counting5. It may also seem that if we just realize the great social benefits of a strong system of higher education, capitalism can become friendly and green enough to sustain us all. But that's not the case, partly because the right-wing knows that one of the key products of higher education is that it produces dissent in the form of uncomfortable truths, such as the reality of climate change. They have vested interests in not seeing these benefits realized. [PERSON] is himself more of a liberal apologist, so I differ from some of his encouraging hopes that the ruling class should just accept these truths. But [PERSON] does understand the conceptual difficulties of measurement, so he admits that \"complete precision is impossible.\" Given these limitations, he is not deterred to make the effort because of his belief that \"a reasonable judgment can be made\" ([PERSON], 2009, p. 243). We need such judgments because for the foreseeable future we will be living in a money-based economy, and there will always be some form of monetary value for non-market goods under any economic mode of production, whether capitalist, socialist, or communist. Markets and money don't just disappear when you move to a new mode of production, but there is certainly no such thing as a \"free market\" for all citizens. Genuine funding for the education crisis will call for some form of democratic socialism, at the least, but we will not be able to ameliorate the crisis of care under some hypothetically friendly version of capitalism.  
Footnote 5: See also [PERSON]’s, et. al., _Mism measuring Our Lines_. ([PERSON] et al., 2010)  
Even after acknowledging the statistical limitations, [PERSON]'s results are quite astonishing: the social benefits and non-market values far exceed the more easily tabulated direct private market values. He begins by confirming what everyone knows: there are considerable private market benefits to a college education, and he calculates that, in 2007 dollars, they amount to an average per year benefit for the graduates of $31,174.