I pondered posting this link to Hacker News, after seeing it on my Facebook feed from a friend's wall. The Hacker News welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Well, maybe it's a bit harsh to describe the link kindly submitted here (which I almost submitted myself) as a "crap link," but at least it is fair to say that the link submitted here is a rant, not a carefully reasoned analysis of the history of the issue. Nor is the link a prescription for building a sustainable model for higher education in the United States that benefits all citizens in general.

Let's look at the propositions implicit in the submitted article's five easy steps for killing American universities.

"First, you defund public higher education."

But actually the funding of higher education around the world has been the subject of much study by many economists of education of many nationalities, and the consistent finding is that the greatest access to the greatest quality of higher education for the greatest number of young people is to have a mixed system of some universities being wholly privately operated, perhaps with some public subsidies for students to attend them, along with some universities being government-operated, usually with substantial revenue from student tuition fees and research grants, and a variety of list prices from high to low, with a variety of subsidies from high to low. The United States model, by comparison with some other high-access, high-quality countries in higher education, has tended historically to be too high on the taxpayer-funded subsidy side. That takes money (as taxes) from the families of the working poor who will never attend college and transfers it to the families of college-educated parents whose children then enjoy leisure while pursuing higher education. Higher education that really makes a difference for the learner can be privately financed by the learner making use of creditworthiness (of either the learner personally or of the learner's family) to shift spending on education to the present while paying back the spending in the future from an increased income.

"Second, you deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s)"

I challenge the statement that any professor is genuinely "impoverished." This is at best hyperbole, not description. Professors are well off people compared to most adults. If Ph.D. holders are unemployed, it can only be because they are clueless about the private sector job market,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4373983

which is where most of the jobs are, and if the Ph.D. holders are that clueless, how well can they be providing education to the callow youth in their care?

"Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the university."

To date, most university administrators in all universities of the land continue to be academics, the kind of people who have the postgraduate degrees needed to be professors. If some of those people in addition have acumen in organizing academic programs, raising funds for the university, convincing bright students to apply to and enroll in the university, and so on, what is the problem? How can an academic, on the one hand, say that specialized knowledge of teaching in higher education is important (as most do) and that specialized knowledge of [insert academic subject here] is important for professors in each of their particular cases, and not say that specialized knowledge of university administration is important for university administrators?

"Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money"

A certain amount of money from business corporations has been flowing into universities for a long time. To date, I see no evidence that many universities have a culture just like that of a business corporation. Academia and the private for-profit sector still have rather different approaches to problem-solving (and problem IDENTIFICATION) and different internal incentives for workers. Students in a free country will choose universities on the basis of what culture best serves the students, just as donors will choose recipients of donations on the basis of what recipient behavior best makes them feel good for donating. The submitted article's claim that corporate money makes a receiving university a "whore of corporatism," but that claim could be legitimately rephrased to say that accepting some corporate donations, from each of many corporations, puts universities in touch with the real world and helps students have employment opportunities throughout the economy. Companies in competition with one another frequently have to keep a sharper focus on reality than ivory towers protected from meaningful competition.

"Step Five – Destroy the Students"

Well, cry me a river. Come on now, I have lived in the Third World, soon after being a college student who worked my way through my state university in the 1970s, and the life of today's university student in the United States is LAVISH compared to the life of most young people around the world. Here I'll excerpt my longest direct quotation from the submitted article:

"This is accomplished through a two-prong tactic: you dumb down and destroy the quality of the education so that no one on campus is really learning to think, to question, to reason. Instead, they are learning to obey, to withstand “tests” and “exams”, to follow rules, to endure absurdity and abuse. Our students have been denied full-time available faculty, the ability to develop mentors and advisors, faculty-designed syllabi which changes each semester, a wide variety of courses and options. Instead, more and more universities have core curriculum which dictates a large portion of the course of study, in which the majority of classes are administrative-designed “common syllabi” courses, taught by an army of underpaid, part-time faculty in a model that more closely resembles a factory or the industrial kitchen of a fast food restaurant than an institution of higher learning."

My response to the first prong is that a well educated student who has received only SECONDARY schooling ought to be able to "think, to question, to reason." If students are entering university unable to do those things (and the submitted article's claim appears to be that they are) at adult age, then perhaps there is a problem in United States education, but it is a problem K-12 education, not in university education. Anyone admitted to university education ought to be able to "think, to question, to reason."

"The Second Prong: You make college so insanely unaffordable that only the wealthiest students from the wealthiest of families can afford to go to the school debt free."

College is eminently affordable to a great many students in the United States. There is still to this day a large taxpayer-funded public sector of higher education with amazingly low list prices. Work opportunities for college students still abound, even in a high-unemployment economy. Of course not everyone obtains a higher education degree without going into debt (as I took care to do decades ago). But, again, borrowing money for higher education is a good idea if higher education provides value to the student. The problem here really seems to be a shopping problem. If students are not taking care to match the cost of college to their means of paying for college (as I did in my day), they should look for college majors that have positive economic return. (My oldest son was able to put money in the bank each semester of college enrollment, even in the current college cost environment, because he learned a lot as a secondary school student and was able to gain academic scholarships. Then he found he could gain a lot of part-time and summer work during college because of the skills he had already developed. College need not impose debt on students.)

The article sums up by saying, "Within one generation, in five easy steps, not only have the scholars and intellectuals of the country been silenced and nearly wiped out, but the entire institution has been hijacked, and recreated as a machine through which future generations will ALL be impoverished, indebted and silenced." I call baloney on this statement. The scholars and intellectuals of the country HAVE NOT been silenced--indeed, changing the mix of funding of higher education in the United States so that more payment comes from the families of college students and less from taxpayers in general who will never attend college is a social justice GAIN over the system that existed when I was in college. With the Internet to serve as a reader's guide, anyone who is serious about LEARNING about any subject can be directed to books and articles of higher quality

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=economics+of+education

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION...

http://www.nber.org/programs/ed/ed.html

http://cee.lse.ac.uk/

to help develop a deeper understanding of complicated public policy issues that get beyond blog post slogans to serious analysis of public policy trade-offs.