FBXL Social

Assuming there's a set number of education dollars, making sure everything is everywhere means you're taking dollars at crowded schools where a course is wanted and instead using them at sparsely populated schools where a course isn't particularly wanted.

That would result in the people in places where something is wanted being in worse shape, and the people in places where a course isn't particularly wanted being in far better shape artificially. Imagine if you had many departments with no students or almost no students, and a rural university being required to fully fund equally resourced versions of those programs. I imagine the rural Montana university urban planning or outreach degree programs being harder to get qualified teachers for than the University of Chicago equivalent. Meanwhile, the university of Chicago ranch management program would need to be funded like the Montana university program as well.

One real question is whether universities are appropriate for purpose anyway. Prior the WWII they were mostly finishing schools for elites, and they were democratized as part of a (brilliant, if we're being honest) regime intended to prevent repeats of the rise of Hitler or Mussolini or the American Bonus Army, basically giving places for trained killers to go and find opportunities for upward social mobility. You can see that in the tiny number if courses that are relevant to your job that are required to get a "degree" in that field. It makes sense for an elite ruling class to be well rounded in the sciences and humanities, but I can't say it makes similar sense for someone who wants to get vocational training to get a well rounded education when what they want is a job. Notably, the post-World war conditions that made the move necessary hasn't been true for generations. Most of the people the system was intended for are dead of old age, and so are some of their kids.

Another question is whether secondary schools are doing their jobs, since university is increasingly taking the place of high school in establishing basic competence employers can rely on, and some public schools have failed to graduate a single person reading, writing, and doing arithmetic at grade level. Part of the problem is Goodhart's law, that bureaucrats look at high school graduates making more money than drop outs and concluding that therefore we should help more people become high school graduates, which drives down standards and results in the value of such a diploma being diluted among all graduates, which ultimately results in the credential inflation we see.

But I'm just a blue collar schlub, so what do I know?