Not Quite Getting It

Matt Grist argues in the Guardian that universities should be considered like any other business. His argument is as follows:

markets are messy places where people are trusted to use their own initiative to make the right choices. This is desirable because people are closer than governments to the facts. What's more, a lot of knowledge about markets is hard to articulate: it is stored in habits and "common sense", and so not at all amenable to standardised interpretation.
So to trust markets is to trust the wisdom of the public to run their own lives. In the case of higher education, this is to trust students and parents to work out whether a university is any good or not, as opposed to trusting central government or vested interests to do so.

If you're wondering why he doesn't think the same argument applies to so many other cases it's because he doesn't quite get it:

Of course, it is true that markets are not always the best means for ensuring quality, efficiency and fairness, which is why we should be pluralists about them. The railways in Britain are a case in point. Where there is no effective competition, how can there be a market? I can't choose between train operators if only one can get me from London to Manchester. Similarly, until bad schools are allowed to fail and good schools expand, it is hard to see how a market for schools can work.

Has Matt not watched Braveheart?

Statistics and Choices

At Left Foot Forward, Ranjit Sidhu, founder of Statistics into Decisions, discusses higher education funding in the UK. In his discussion he says:

this country is spending far lower than any other OECD country and actually half that of the USA on education.

This claim about spending half what the USA does comes from a report from the Russell Group[pdf]. That report states:

At 2.9% of GDP, the US spends more than twice what the UK does.

Earlier in the article Mr Sidhu has noticed the point about different population sizes pointing out that:

With about 5 per cent of the population of China it has an economy more than half its size.

Yet here he seems to have forgotten about that. Nor has he read much of the report, it seems. Just two lines earlier the Russell report states:

The UK spends approximately $15,447 (USD) per student, while the US spends $25,109.

By my reckoning that's 1.6 times as much not twice. But crucially, apart from not considering population sizes, Mr Sidhu has not considered the source of this funding. In fact, 66% of the funding in the US comes from private sources whereas in the UK it is 35%. Some quick maths and we find that the taxpayer pays $10,040.55 for each student in the UK but only $8,537.06 per student in the US.

So when the headline says:

We can afford to fund our universities, the fact is we choose not to 

he may be entirely correct. But he is not correct to suggest that in order to keep up with America the taxpayers should be forced to pay.