"Is Media Studies a ‘proper’ degree?"

"Should Polytechnics all be closed down?"

"Should all Grammars be closed and the 11+ abolished?"

Now, as a libertarian, the answers seem fairly obvious to me – the problem in each of these cases is the usual one: the government. Here’s what I would propose instead, and why.

1) Get the government out of university education, full stop. No subsidies, no top up fees, no sate financing altogether.

Let the free market take over entirely, and there will be no such thing as a worthless degree: if someone has to pay the full cost of their studies, you better believe they’re only going to do it if they think it’s a good use of the money. Questions like "is media studies a proper degree" will simply disappear – if it’s valued enough, either by employers or by students who are sufficiently motivated to want to learn the subject, then it’s a proper degree. The only reason the issue of ‘mickey taxpaying public feel resentful at having to fund 3 years of someone dossing about learning about Golf Management (or whatever). Get rid of the fact that taxpayers are the ones supporting these degrees, and I think the problem will be as uncontroversial as when someone else buys your least favourite flavour of crisps.

The main problem is, essentially, that education is like all other economic goods – if you artificially reduce the price below the true market value and keep the supply constant (as state intervention clearly does), the result is a massively increased demand where the benefits don’t reflect the real costs. This problem is exacerbated in the market for education, because education is used (as other goods tend not to be) as a signalling device to employers: if everyone else in the economy has a higher level of education than is otherwise viable, you have to get it too in order to get a job – and so demand is higher again than it should be. Which, of course, translates into more government spending, wasting scarce resources.

Now if you’re sitting behind your monitor screaming "But education is a public good! There are positive externalities!", I’d recommend reading David Friedman’s excellent "The weak case for public schooling" which is extremely applicable to the case of higher education.

2) Institute a voucher system for schooling – give every parent a voucher for the =~ £5k the state would spend on their education, and let them take it to any school which would accept it.

The idea behind this is that competition is only a good thing for consumers: if you can only send your kids to one school in the area, it has no incentive to provide good teaching, a high level of care, and so on – it’s guaranteed your custom no matter what. On the other hand if you allow parents to choose where the money goes, it gives schools a real reason to provide a better service – because if they don’t, they’ll soon enough lose all their funding!

I’ve honestly never heard a convincing argument against school vouchers, but the most common one is something along the lines of "All you would be doing is subsidising middle class parents to send their kids to private schools." Well, this may be true, but there are a couple of points here. Firstly, it’s undeniable that middle class parents are adept at manipulating the state school system anyway – compare suburban grammar schools with inner city comprehensive – so it is far from obvious that this advantage would be increased under a voucher system. But secondly, and most importantly, even if it does benefit middle class children, it would benefit the poorest kids most of all. The kids that would benefit most from competition are the ones in the worst schools of all. If our objective is education rather than equality, as it should be, surely we should jump at the opportunity to raise the standards of the lowest income groups a little, even in the extreme and unlikely case where means increasing the standards of the higher income groups a lot.