Let the free market fix higher education

The regents, the chancellor and the campus presidents are all wringing their hands over the governor's proposed budget cuts for higher education. They claim such cuts will starve a vital economic engine that could pull the state of Nevada out of a recession that has left 180,000-plus jobless, shuttered businesses and caused the nation's highest home foreclosure rate.

"I think the state has called upon higher education to help get us out of this economic crisis we're in, to diversify the economy. We can't realistically be expected to do that if budgets continue to be cut," Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Dan Klaich has been quoted as saying.

Are state universities the canaries in the economic coal mine?

Charles Murray -- a political scientist, author, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a libertarian -- doesn't necessarily think so.

"If you have very few college graduates, as we did, let's say, back in the 1930s," Murray replied when asked about such economic development claims during an interview this past week, "then building colleges and getting smart kids into college can be economic development, because you have this amount of cognitive talent that is being wasted. In 1930, most of the cognitively gifted children did not go to college, so in that case, yeah, it can be economic development.

"If you're talking about 2011, when virtually everybody who has remotely the ability to do college-level work is already in college, adding more colleges, getting more kids into those colleges who don't belong there, is not economic development by any stretch of the imagination."

Murray's latest book is "Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality." In it he outlines a free-market framework for reshaping higher education -- not so much advocating for it, but predicting that market forces will necessarily bring about change.

"Market forces can help undermine the bachelor's degree," Murray said, "which is a very silly way to pursue post-secondary education for most students, because most students don't want a classic liberal education that takes four years. What they want is marketing or to learn criminology for going into law enforcement or some other specific set of knowledge that will enable them to get a certain kind of job.

"Market forces will go a long way toward saying we can provide that to you and it won't take four years and it's not going to take $160,000 to get it."

One of the market forces at play, suggests Murray, is the college student's return on that huge tuition investment.

For a long time, everybody talked about the extra money one makes if you have a college degree, he said, adding there is some truth to that if you are only talking about large aggregates of people. But for the individual, whether college makes economic sense is another matter.

"So that somebody who can be an extremely successful electrician and make maybe a six-figure salary as his own small business owner," Murray explains, "is going to have a much more difficult time competing with others who want to become corporation executives, if his skill set is not competitive with their skill set in those areas."

In "Real Education," Murray cites specific statistics to support this. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, reported in 2005 that the mean annual income for an electrician was $45,630, half the mean of $88,450 for business management jobs requiring a BA degree.

But there is a bell curve for skills (Murray co-authored the controversial book "The Bell Curve" in 1994, by the way). Someone who might become an excellent electrician might be a poor manager. Those BLS stats show the top 90th percentile of electricians earn $70,480 compared to $37,800 for the bottom 10th percentile for managers -- possibly with a sizable student loan to pay off.

For many employers, the alternative to the four- or five-year bachelor's degree, Murray offers, might be a certification program -- such as certified public accountant, just as an example.

"The example I give in the book ... " he said, "is, suppose that IBM says we will interview people that don't have BA's. Instead what we want to see is their score on this really good test for programming ability, let's say. And if IBM says they are going to be using that test for their hiring decisions, you can be quite confident the rest of the IT industry will start to adopt that very quickly."

This could quickly and cheaply supplant the expensive and not always reliable bachelor's degree for many employers, the author suggests.

Murray does not foresee the destruction of colleges. Colleges will still be filled with students, but they won't all be there in the "BA straitjacket" for four years.

He said the goal of education should not be a degree, but to have our children reach adulthood having learned how to search for something they love to do and do well.

The free market is better suited for achieving this than government central planners siphoning tax dollars out of the private economy.

Thomas Mitchell is senior opinion editor of the Review-Journal. He may be reached at (702) 383-0261 or via email at tmitchell@ reviewjournal.com.