Republican views on education are always bleakly simple: schools, from preschool to graduate, are potentially huge sources of revenue trapped in inefficient government agencies.  If you “free” the schools from these government controls, so the market ideology says, you cut inefficiencies and lower costs while improving quality.  History tells us that things are more complicated, but it’s not surprising to find Willard Romney promoting the company line (“Romney’s support for Full Sail University raises eyebrows in higher ed“).

Even nominal monopolies  like public schools face market pressures, as my Dad use to remind me, for labor and services. You can’t take any institution “out of capitalism.”  So the market shapes everything already. It’s not whether or not the  market economy shapes an institution, it’s always about  shaping  markets through our laws and regulations. In Finland, as has been said many times, education is effective because a market has been shaped that makes teaching a well paid, relatively high status profession.

It’s expensive and unnecessary to “privatize” the public school system to sharpen market forces; it’s more effective to make teaching professionally lucrative.  The privatization of the public schools should be stopped; we can use the money we save  to focus on increasing the competitiveness of teachers. Higher education is no different: we need to change the market so that teachers are well paid and high status professionals, honest competitors to lawyers and engineers. That will improve all schools, public as well as for-profit.

This seems like an overly obvious statement, but as this chart, published by the Chronicle of Higher Education, shows, one reason the universities act like corporations seeking profits and not democratic institutions serving the public good is that corporations, in effect, pay the salaries of many university presidents.  The chart suggests that greed is endemic and that, even in education, money is a driving force.

In effect, universities are simply nodes in the interlocking directorates that knit together corporate power centers and that have helped to create the democratic and social stagnation reflected in the profound concentrations of wealth that have emerged in the U.S. in the last three or four decades. The public university system isn’t simply influenced by corporate culture, it’s an important part of corporate culture.

The last great academic myth is that the university is a bulwark against the market. In fact, the to the extent that education is a source of substantive cultural and economic power, the university is at the cutting edge of the dismantling of democratic culture.  The university is a model of U.S. capitalism: workers are  insecure and poorly paid, student/consumers pay more and are swamped in debt, and at the top, administrators get richer.