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<p>One solution that I alluded to before may have great potential - * colleges would only charge tuition/housing to students who actually graduate*. In other words, those students who don’t graduate don’t have to incur a mountain of debt that will hinder their freedom. Some minor modifications might have to be made for those students who may not graduate from one particular school but simply transfer their credits to another school from which they graduate, hence one could imagine a pro-rated tuition system where a college would not provide an official grade transcript that a student could use to apply for transfer admissions to another school unless that student paid his outstanding fees. But nevertheless, the guiding principle would be that schools would not be paid unless students graduated.</p>
<p>Schools would then immediately become far more careful about who they admit, knowing that they will lose money on admitted students who never graduate. We would then have to be vigilant about schools weakening graduation requirements to push out more graduated students (and hence be paid), but, frankly, many schools have already weakened their graduation requirements through grade inflation and creampuff majors. </p>
<p>But right now, a fundamental problem is that schools have little incentive beyond indirect reputational and selectivity concerns to not admit students who probably should not be admitted because they are unlikely to graduate. After all the school is paid for all of the terms that a student is there regardless of whether he graduates or not, so the school has little financial incentive to be careful about who it admits. If the student accumulates a mountain of student debt while leaving without a degree, hey, that’s not the school’s problem. But perhaps it should be.</p>
<p>By the same token, public universities should perhaps redirect their state tuition subsidies towards those topics of study that actually foster the most economic growth. Students may be allowed to study whatever they want, but that doesn’t mean that the state taxpayers should necessarily have to subsidize whatever they want to study. Perhaps subsidies should flow only to those majors such as engineering or business that contribute the most to the economy and hence replenish state tax coffers. If somebody really wants to major in American Studies, they are free to do so, but they won’t receive a taxpayer subsidy for doing so. A modified version of this system would be to have that subsidy be contingent upon finding a high-paying job within the state in question. </p>
<p>Would that be outrageous? I think not. Let’s keep in mind that many state universities already in effect choose to subsidize or not subsidize certain courses of study by simply offering or not offering them in the first place. A highly disproportionate percentage of the top engineering programs are at public universities, often times as part of their charter as official Morrill Land-grant universities specifically to stoke the development of agriculture, science, and engineering (but notably not the humanities). By the same token, not every liberal arts major is offered at every public university. I don’t see much practical difference between a school that offers the panoply of majors but preferentially subsidizes certain majors rather than others, vs. a school that doesn’t even offer the unsubsidized majors at all. Either way, you’re steering students towards certain majors and away from others. </p>
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<p>I don’t see why there would be any legal problems. After all, I don’t think anybody is arguing that the Morrill Land Grant Acts are somehow “illegal” because they foster and promote certain courses of study such as engineering and science over others. </p>
<p>You also talk about how academics should have the freedom to research whatever they want because we never know what the future fruits of research might be. But the truth is, that freedom is currently a mirage. Academics cannot research literally anything they want. They have to obtain funding - often times extensive amounts of funding - and if nobody is willing to provide the appropriate grants, they can’t really research that topic. On the other hand, those academics who propose to conduct research with, say, clear military applications will be able to access a large pot of grant money from the Department of Defense. I don’t think anybody questions the legality of that arrangement, or is proposing that the DoD ought to reallocate all its grant funding towards funding literary analysis of Elizabethan poetry. President Barack Obama (and President Bush before him) proposed that grant money be allocated specifically towards sparking research in green energy technologies (but not so much in the humanities). Is that illegal too? </p>
<p>Furthermore, for an academic to even conduct research at all means that you had to have been hired by an academic institution. Yet universities don’t just hire anybody - they hire only those who they think will make a worthy contribution to their department, and these decisions are often times highly arbitrary and political. {For example, I know one business PhD who had a rough time on the job market, was rejected for tenure-track positions at plenty of lower-end schools, and garnered only a single tenure-track job offer … at the MIT Sloan School, one of the best B-schools in the world. Of course the fact that his advisor had recently jumped to MIT and strongly endorsed his hiring may have had something to do with it.} Yet the hiring practices of universities are currently heavily influenced by funders, whether individual donors or the government. The government could say that they aim to fund X professorships at the top universities to those who are performing important military research, and nobody would question that legality. Nor would anybody argue that those professorships should be directed towards the humanities.</p>
<p>The point is that right now, we hardly have a system where people are free to study and research whatever they wish. Rather, we have a system where certain topics are heavily preferred. Since nobody has ever questioned the legality of the current arrangement, why would they question another arrangement where different topics are likewise preferred over others? </p>
<p>Academia is not a free market and never will be, but rather is heavily subject to political forces. Those political forces can potentially be redirected to achieve different outcomes. For example, in 2003, the Federal government anointed certain universities (5 so far) as “Sun Grant” universities with the specific mandate to research solar and other renewable energy technologies. That surely means preferentially hiring and promoting more professors and perhaps admitting more students (grad and undergrad) who conduct that type of research. I don’t think anybody questions the legality of that arrangement.</p>