Education

Following my last entry, I promised I would talk about how to not only decrease government's education expense, but also improve the quality of schools. The idea is actually very simple. For people that know me well would know that I am a supporter of free trades and the idea of "small government, big market" (another reason I support Mr. McCain over Mr. Obama). The way I am going with this is, if the education system is not controlled by the government as it is now, it will be much more efficient (Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"). People might argue that education is a public good, and there is no other way it can be maintained to sustain the quality of teacher. I say, it is actually quite plausible to turn it into a private service and as we all know, the private sector is a lot better at improving quality because they need to gain a competitive advantage to survive.


First off, I understand that universities take a lot of money from governments for researching and other purposes. But what happens if the economy goes bad and the government has a budget deficit, they would either have to cut their spending, and that includes the education budget, or raise tax rates to get the budget back to green figures. We, as consumers, would want neither of that as both would increase our cost of living either directly (increase in tax payments) or indirectly (cut in education budget and force universities to increase tuition fees to cover their own expenses). But if we were able to privatize them, they will not be subject to fluctuations in the economy. People might ask, what about the budget for researching, where is it going to come from if there is no government backing? The logic is simple, if universities are privatized, they can woo businessmen to sponsor them in return for first options on their more talented graduates. this would in turn encourage the university to invest more to improve their students' grades either by luring higher quality professor or asking successful individuals to be guest lecturers to attract even more investors to give them money. Here comes another question, doesn't the state of the economy affect how much investors are willing to pay as well? Yes it does, but for people that do finance, getting more investors is exactly the same as diversifying your portfolio. So even if there is a recession, fluctuations would be greatly reduced. Instead of having just one sponsor backing you up, and that sponsor is directly related to what consumers spend, and that sponsor also have to invest in many other institutions, a university will be able to get exclusive sponsors and a large number of them.


Apart from tertiary educations, there are also secondary and primary schools and also pre-schools to take care of. As we know, many schools nowadays try to improve every aspect about them to attract students. Things like sports fields, gyms, technologies and try to be the best in literally every subject they have on offer. If some other schools have a particular subject that a certain school does not have, they will get a teacher currently employed and has a bit of knowledge about it to teach it. Not only is this inefficient (as the teacher of the new subject is not an expert on it), this also pulls down the quality of learning for students. After years of watching soccer and having seen players that can play in a variety of positions, me and my father came to a conclusion, "the more versatile a player is, the more average (to put it politely) that person is at every single one of these positions". It works the same for schools, as a school needs to concern about maintaining the quality of many subjects, the lower the quality will be as there is always only a limited amount of resources. So here comes another economic concept, specialization. I am not telling schools to only teach subjects they are good at, but to concentrate more on them while maintaining the required quality for the other subjects. This way, teachers will have more time to concentrate on the subjects they are good at and not have to prepare for every subjects the school has to offer.

The idea I proposed above obviously does not decrease education expenses for the government, but it is one of the main factors in the process to achieve that objective. Many countries offer free education up to a certain age or grade level, the amount of money spent for this purpose takes a big proportion of the government's budget. What I am proposing is not a new concept, but many countries are reluctant to use it as it might lower the quantity of some of the less highly regarded schools' applications and might result in a closure of some of these schools. The policy of issuing school voucher is the government sponsoring each child and that child can use that voucher as part of their school fee to apply for whichever school they wish to attend. The reason I talked about specialization is because parents don't choose certain schools for their kids for no reason, they choose a particular school because that school is good at something that their child wants to do. Back to how the voucher works, it does not matter if the voucher is the full payment of the school fee or not, the fact that parents will now be able to choose schools and result in much higher quality and efficiency will more than compensate for that. As for those less highly regarded schools, they will find ways to improve their competitiveness to survive if there was no government intervention at all. Once the quality of the students improve, less money will be needed from the government to spend on social welfare and courses made for re-educational purposes (for people that cannot get a job).

Like I said before, the schemes I proposed can drastically reduce government's expenses and improve teacher quality at the same time. Some extra information, the Department of Education in Hong Kong often changes the education system and still says the system is good and helping students improve. But it is quite obvious over the last few years that Hong Kong students' competitiveness against other countries' children is decreasing. Funny enough, these government officials that supports the education system actually send their kids to other countries for education at the first possible opportunity. Another reason I say politicians know nothing about education and market forces, all they want is more power over the life of ordinary citizens.