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Follow CapCon on XMSNBC Host Who Said Kids Belong To Community Also Says Education Funding Desperately Inadequate
United States spends more per pupil than any country in the world; 30 percent more than a decade ago
While MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry has created a controversy over her comments about children not belonging to their parents, there is another comment Harris-Perry made that deserves a closer look.
In a promotion for the cable news channel, Harris-Perry said:
We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.
While the whole statement is being criticized by many, her statement on education investment is the easiest to look at empirically. If by investing Harris-Perry means dollars, she'd have a hard time convincing people that what she said is credible.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the U.S. spent more per student than any other country on public education in 2009, the last year for which information was available. For all levels of public education, the U.S. spent $15,812 per student in 2009. That’s the highest in the world. Switzerland was second at $14,716. Mexico spent $2,895 per student.
State and local governments in the U.S. spent $859.9 billion on public education in 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s a 30.1 percent increase from $660.5 billion (adjusted for inflation) that the U.S. spent in 2000.
"There's no question we've had very big increases in federal spending in public education," said Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Cato Institute's Center for Education Freedom. "There is no rational way to say we are not spending a lot on public schooling. We are not under spending."
In Michigan, spending from 2000 to 2010 has increased when adjusted for inflation.
In 2000, state and local governments spent $28.4 billion on all levels of public education, adjusted for inflation. In 2010, state and local governments spent $29 billion on public education.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, from 1970-2009, funding per pupil for K-12 has increased 300 percent in real dollars.
Michigan Capitol Confidential is the news source produced by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Michigan Capitol Confidential reports with a free-market news perspective.
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Subsidies Drive Up College Costs
In a piece for Slate, the left-leaning business and economics writer Matthew Yglesias says increasing subsidies for college won’t bring down the price.
In an effort to explain, he cites an article from Bloomberg Businessweek that shows that the number of administrators at Purdue University has jumped 54 percent — nearly eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track professors. Nationwide, the number of college and university administrators increased 10 times faster than tenured faculty.
Yglesias explains:
This is something legislators need to understand as they push for increases in higher education funding here in Michigan with encouragement from different factions. As the demand for college increases and the cost rises, institutions of higher learning have little incentive to actually cut costs. Why should they when they are getting more students and more tuition along with extra funding from the state?
College costs will not come down until the demand falls and that will occur when schools feel the pinch from fewer students and are forced to compete.
Higher education spending, especially as direct appropriations, is not much more than a subsidy from the poor to the rich. They encourage students to take out loans they cannot afford and devote time to gain knowledge that may or may not have any value in the job market. For that and many other reasons, the state should limit the subsidies.
As Yglesias concludes, “At any given level of subsidy, schools are going to charge families what they can afford to pay and then they're going to take that money and spend it on the stuff that the people running the school want to spend it on.”
Michigan Capitol Confidential is the news source produced by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Michigan Capitol Confidential reports with a free-market news perspective.
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