Balance

A few years ago, while on vacation in Italy, my wife and I toured a winery in Tuscany and ended up spending an hour or so chatting with the in-house sommelier, a woman in her early thirties. After pouring a really terrific Vino Nobile de Montepulciano, she off-handedly mentioned that she had earned a law degree from a public university but had never practiced, deciding to pursue a career in wine instead. Tuition had been free, so it wasn't an economically hard choice to make. Part of me thought this was great, but another part started worrying about subsidy-induced overconsumption and the fact that some other student had been denied the chance for an expensive education that she had essentially wasted. Then I had another glass of wine and stopped worrying about it, because Tuscany is, in fact, just as nice as they say.  

College tuition in Finland is also free, even for non-EU foreigners. (Memo to students: if your college charges you full tuition to attend the University of Helsinki when you take a semester abroad, they're ripping you off.) This is widely seen as a bedrock principle and is unlikely to change anytime soon, at least for Finnish (and thus EU) citizens. But Finland also has a recently-established system of polytechnic institutions that are eager to grow in stature and compete with the more prestigous, long-established research universities. The national legislature is currently considering an ambitious shake-up of the whole postsecondary system that would give the institutions more license to raise private money and otherwise act in a more autonomous, self-interested way--to be more like American institutions, in other words. At some point, the tuition question will likely end up on the table.

From a policy perspective, there are basically three options: no tuition, market-rate tuition, or somewhere in between. Pure market rate tuition keeps low- and middle-income students out of college and reduces overall educational attainment. No tuition solves that problem but has side effects like legal expertise slowly dissipating in the Tuscan sun, as well as Finnish humanities students taking epic amounts of time to complete their degrees. It also makes universities wholly dependant on the economic fortunes of the state and the whims of politicians for funding.

The best solution, in theory, is somewhere in between--highly subsidized but not non-existent tuition, so students have a stake in their education and universities have multiple sources of revenue. The problem is that of three options, this is by far the least stable, because the various actors involved have fundamentally different interests, and public tuition policy becomes a 24/7 arena in which those interests constantly collide. Students, like all consumers, want the best possible value. Public policymakers want universities to produce the maximum possible number of well-educated graduates using some finite level of resources. Universities want as much money as they can get from everyone. From the standpoint of pure rational self-interest, it always makes sense for a publicly-subsidized university to raise tuition, as long as they keep it somewhere below the market rate. Since the distance between the subsidized rate and the market rate is generally quite large, there's a lot of potential for change--and thus, things to argue about. 

The only way to manage this is to maintain some degree of shared values among all three parties whereby everyone recognizes--and on some level, accedes to--the interests of others. This is easier to do in a country like Finland, a nation of 5.5 million people who are unusually homogenous and committed to egalitarian ideals. America is a more unruly and complicated place. Diversity and self-interest have given us a tremendously robust and successful higher education system (at least at the top end). But it also makes it hard to agree on important things.