Public Trust

From a Bible college to an Ivy League campus, local communities (and the public as a whole) should expect these institutions to do what they say they do and to be what they say they are. Can higher education, in other words, endure without the support of the people? Where does such support come from? How is the public trust in their purpose and governance maintained?

Regulation
A legal (or quasi-legal) form of critique that leverages the taxing power of the state and the public purse to influence the purpose of higher education and to engineer specific social outcomes in the community.

Critique
The means by which institutions of higher learning are woven into the national fabric of cultural institutions, and the methods by which they are held accountable.

  • Armed with wit and statistical data about education’s payoff in the marketplace, Bryan Caplan argues in The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money that education does not generally prepare students for jobs (or for life, or to appreciate high culture, or for any of the host of other things claimed about schools’ accomplishments). Instead, education signals three primary things to employers: intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. Public funding of schooling is therefore a “waste.” Caplan argues that education may remain a good investment for some students (because the credential is a valuable signal); however, even for individual students, education’s value for all but the best has been greatly exaggerated.
  • Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really tell us” presents a clear, compelling critique of America’s system for determining its “best” universities.

University Governance Structures, a library of references focusing on the history and traditions of higher education, is the companion site of Paideia Times, an online news digest of higher education.

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