Weaknesses of "Not a Public Good" Arguments Against Higher Education Funding

In arguments about public education, many people debate whether or not education is a public good in which the government should invest. Strong proponents of public education (like UVA’s own Thomas Jefferson) often define education as a public good, while others (like economists) remind us that goods with positive externalities are not necessarily public goods. It is true that education is not a pure public good; education is neither non-rivalrous nor non-excludable. Education policy researcher Preston Cooper emphasizes this point in his Forbes piece arguing for students bearing “some or most of the cost” of higher education because it is not a pure public good. Although there are definite costs and benefits to relative levels of government funding of higher education, the argument against government provision of higher education because it is not a pure public good is not completely sound.

In Externalities: Problems and Solutions, Gruber explains that “most of the goods we think of as public goods are really impure public goods, which satisfy these two conditions to some extent, but not fully” (170). For example, cable TV and private parks are excludable, but not rival. Although higher education is excludable, higher education is a lesser degree of rival than are other goods that the government provides. While college classrooms have maximum capacities and different types of courses have different optimal numbers of students, college class sizes are typically larger than those of primary and secondary schools. For example, more than 450 UVA students attend introductory micro and macroeconomics lectures at the same time without negatively affecting each others' learning. There is a point at which higher education becomes rival, but higher education falls closer to a public good on the continuum we discussed today than public education currently provided by the government. While the government provides many services with positive externalities that are not public goods and higher education being a purer public good than primary and secondary education does not necessarily mean that it should also be free, analyzing the extent to which higher education is non-rivalrous addresses arguments like Cooper’s that since higher education is “unambiguously not a public good,” it should not be publicly provided.