Continued decline of the public university

[cobrat]

Well, I think the aside came about from a wider philosophical issue: Whether the individual or the collective is the best director of the commons. If you look at it in that frame, issues surrounding public transportation and public education are exactly the same thing—if you believe that the individual is the best way of dealing with things, then both publicly funded education and transportation systems are at least partially suspect; on the other hand, if the collective is the best for it, then they’re both excellent.

One could also fall somewhere between the extreme individualist and collectivist sides and feel certain things like public utilities, emergency services, public infrastructure such as roads, and public transportation are better handled collectively whereas other things are better handled individually and/or that there can be individualist-minded exceptions in certain cases(i.e. Cars in areas where public transportation infrastructure is poor/non-existent or doesn’t serve one’s transportation needs in their situational context).