While California is facing the largest cuts to education, similar cuts are happening all over the country, making it harder for students to afford college and lowering the quality of the education they receive.It would be reasonable to assume that some students of high quality attend lower-quality public universities because they want to save money. We would predict that as the monetary difference between school decreases, student selection into schools will become more quality based. In fact, this would cause the quality of the best institutions to increase, and that of the worst to decrease. The marginal student is the student who expects to gain from a college education exactly what he paid for it. Thus, as the cost of education rises, we should see that students gain more from their education are the ones who continue to receive an education.
This student quality improvement could be met also with an improvement in teacher quality. The article, turning to a discussion of why charter schools are poor makes the following statement:
Furthermore, charter schools are almost always non-union, which means their teachers receive can receive lower compensation and have less job security.Less job security for teachers would lead to an improvement in teacher quality. First, job security distorts incentives. Without job security, and teachers will work hard to keep their jobs. In addition, without job security the worst teachers get fired and replaced with fresh faces. These younger replacements have lower salaries, saving the state even more. In general, we should expect that increased efficiency would only increase the quality of education.
The good universities can always fill every slot no matter how high they raise their prices. No surprise that the inflation costs of higher education exceed those of healthcare or any other major sector. In the other universities, the more the state pours in the higher the prices rise.
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