Education is a public good, so should be free

The argument

The argument is about who should pay, and it answers by asking who benefits. If a university education benefited only the person receiving it, charging that person the full cost would be straightforward. The claim here is that this is not the case, and that the funding arrangement should follow the distribution of the benefit. The returns to everyone else are substantial and run in several directions. A better-educated workforce improves the economy, because the skills graduates bring raise what the whole of it can produce. It improves public health, since education is associated with better health outcomes and therefore with lighter demands on health services. And it leads to higher democratic participation, which is a gain to the political community rather than to any individual within it. None of these accrue to the graduate alone; all of them accrue to people who never attended. The institutions make the same point concretely. University facilities are frequently re-purposed and used by local residents and by nearby companies — buildings, libraries, laboratories, grounds and the research capacity attached to them. A university is an asset to the place it sits in, and the surrounding community draws on it whether or not its members ever enrol. From there the fairness argument is short. Where a good produces benefits for people beyond the person who buys it, charging that person the full cost makes them subsidise everyone else. Students would be paying in full for something the economy, the health service, the democratic system and their local area all draw on. Proponents of this position conclude that the cost should be borne collectively, as it is for other public goods, and that the UK should make higher education free for students.

Context

A public good is something which has positive externalities, or put simply, a good which brings benefits not only to the purchaser. As higher education has broader benefits for a country, it brings into question whether students should be the only ones who pay for it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

In strict economic terms, a public good must be both non-excludable (everyone has access to it), and non-rival (everyone can access the good without depleting the resource itself). As a result, education does not fit these criteria because not everyone has access to higher education, and the resource is finite; a university can teach only so many students. As a result, many economists would argue against university being a public good.

Rejecting the premises

Rejecting P1. University is NOT a public good.