Alex Tabarrok wonders:
The United State's has one of the most admired university systems in the world and one of the most deplored k-12 systems. Could the difference have something to do with the fact that universities operate in a competitive market with lots of private suppliers while k-12 is dominated by monopolistic, government provided schools?
Well, no. Mainly because universities operate in a market dominated by monopolistic, government provided schools, while K-12 institutions exist in a competitive market populated by private suppliers. What's true for one should be true for the other, and largely, it is.
Folks tend to overestimate the number of students who attend private, four-year universities, but for those wondering, the actual total is 21.6%. Another 39.2% attend public -- which is to say monopolistic, government provided -- four year institutions, and most of the rest attend public two year colleges.
Meanwhile, about 12% of K-12 students are enrolled at private institutions. Less than the corresponding number for university students, but only by 9%. Does Tabarrok think there's some mystical tipping point, wherein 15% of students go private and the ferocious magic of capitalism is instantly unlocked?
In fact, our K-12 system looks a lot like our university system, it's just that we emphasize different parts of the two. Our university system has a handful of gleaming private institutions which educated a couple thousand kids years. Our public university system gleams with a few jewels, like the UCs and Michigan, to be sure. But most students go to mediocre state colleges, and no one mentions the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (a perfectly good school, to be sure) as one of the most admired educational institutions in the world. But the attention, for whatever reason, remains on the Harvards, with an undergrad population of 6,000 or so, rather than the Nebraskas, which educate around 20,000 undergrads.
Meanwhile, tour the US's private high schools, and you'll find some killer campuses. Awesome architecture, studious kids, top-flight technology, remarkable college acceptance records. Sage, a private high school near my home attended by many of my friends, was a remarkable place. Expensive, sure, but offering an education more rigorous and creative than any college I know of, and a real model of how to teach students to think. University High, where I went, was one of the best public schools in California, and was certainly a tougher educational opponent than the vaunted UCLA, where I got my degree. Of course, neither Sage, with its rich attendees, nor Uni, with its abundance of property taxes, nor the magnets of New York, garner international press. Instead, we rightly focus on the failing schools in Harlem and Los Angeles. But those schools have their matches among state universities serving poor populaces. They operate in similar contexts and fail for similar reasons. We just don't notice.
