based on an article by Arthur M. Hauptman in the Chronicle

England’s conservative government is turning Britain “back to a future” where its education system looks remarkably like its past of a 100 years ago, an elitist system with two tiers. Britain’s s top tier schools, will become more like Harvard and Stanford, private, money producing entities.  If the same thing is to happen here, will the UW retain its ranking as a premier school or fall into a second class?  Could we compete in a national market, as we do in football?

The Tory plan is to eliminate  government support of instruction except in the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics. State funds would ostensibly be replaced by increasing tuition not by a few percent, American style, but by doubling or more.  Tuition rates would   exceed typical tuition in US public universities …. although perhaps not the $50,000 recently announced for UC, Berkeley.    As here, the stated intent is to make up part of the difference in loans and grants to the poorest students.  The plan would preserve Oxford, Cambridge and Hogwarts.

How would a similar approach effect Washington state?  I do not see how Washington state could maintain a top tier school in a competitive market.  This state is relatively wealthy but it is a small market.  How could the UW compete for the brightest and richest American students?  No state our size could continue to have a tier 1 school any more than the Seattle Mariners, with the small Seattle media market,  can compete with the NY Yankees.

Since the Athletic Department is such a marketing wiz, maybe they could run the school?

Of course, there is another point of view .. do elite colleges matter?   A recent outcomes study of 6,335 college graduates found no correlation between the SAT scores of colleges where students enter with high scores and income.  In another post on TA, a student says she dropped out because she did not see the UW as a good place to gain entrepreneurial skills.

Of course this all raises the question, why do  we the public send kids to school at all?  Is the purpose of and elite school to increase our student’s chance at making money?  The question is anything but trivial.  Our society certainly does not reward workers for how hard they work or for the intellectual challenge of their jobs.  Just ask professors of philosophy or Shakespeare.  Or ask an aspiring writer or recent mathematics PhD.  How about someone who so loves literature, that she chooses, as a cousin of mine did, to teach English in a public school?

In an era where MBAs earn inordinate salaries while adding little or nothing to the country’s intellectual wealth or entrepreneurial innovation, how well does earning power of graduates correlate with the overall benefit to society?   Is education in this sense a luxury to be restricted to the very, very wealthy?