Why Not Just Privatize Higher Education?
Posted on SLOG by Goldy on Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:35 PM
So why not just make it official? Let’s just privatize, sell off, or shut down our state colleges and universities and watch the market work its magic.
The best deal for taxpayers would be to auction off the assets to the highest bidders, but that might even strike some Republicans as too radical. So the more pragmatic, yet still fiscally conservative approach would be to just phase out state funding over say, a ten year period, and let the individual institutions sink or swim on their own.
Sounds crazy, I know. Yet we’re already halfway there, and with zero indication that this bipartisan program of disinvestment will turn around anytime soon. So wouldn’t everybody be better served if we were just honest about our state higher education policy, and gave administrators, faculty, and students a little time to prepare?
Maintaining an affordable and excellent public college and university system is simply not a priority in Washington state anymore. It just isn’t. And it hasn’t been for years. The sooner we admit it and move on, the sooner we as a state can lower our economic expectations to meet this new reality.