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Public funding for some degrees questioned
Findings presented at a one-day seminar on higher education base funding make the case that it is hard to justify public tuition subsidies across all university courses. The Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne hosted a national seminar on today (Monday) to further discuss the report of the Base Funding Review (BFR) chaired by former South Australian minister for education, Jane Lomax-Smith. The review was made public last December.
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The externalitites are in fact the major benefit of higher education. For example, the costs of climate change will be much greater precisely because we don’t have a public sufficiently well educated in science to be able to make an astute judgement. They can be and have been conned and the resulting costs will be truly enormous. Similar arguments apply to all sorts of policy matters that require an educated electorate to make sensible judgements.
Of course estimating the externalities accurately is more a matter of voodoo than ‘science’. The authors of the BFR should have been honest enough to admit this. Can defendable, properly estimated confidence intervals around estimates of the value of the externalities be made? The climate change scientists have provided rigorous confidence intervals around their predictions. Have the BFR authors done so?