I attend a college that is $60,000 a year... not even including the amount you have to come up with for textbooks. My freshman year, I wanted to transfer for a few reasons and had met with the Dean to discuss my concerns. To my surprise, one of the things she mentioned pertained to my financial aid, the financial aid that covers my entire tuition plus room and board, was a partial contribution from the alum who give endowments and the students who pay full price to attend because they do not have financial hardships. What about that situation? This is a private school and I am essentially attending for free. Being financially independent since I was in middle school, my situation is almost completely analogous to those who see education as a private entity. I could be going to a state school and getting an okay education because I did really well throughout high school, but instead, I was given the opportunity to have a private education and I have the school, alum, and random people who do not know they just indirectly paid for my education to thank for that. Because of this private education, I have better opportunities post-graduation that I may not have had otherwise and I can go into this world and make my contribution to the field I want to pursue.
The argument I pose to those who are against education as a public good is simple. How is it that our education system has become one in which those who can afford a great education have access and those who do not are to some extent, deprived? I do feel that your education is what you make of it, but there are still more opportunities for those who are a little higher up in social class. In an urban education class I took last year, we visited some urban schools and it is INCREDIBLY apparent which schools had decent funding and which did not. And while there are public schools that get less funding that private schools and still provide a decent education, that does not change the fact that society consistently values a private education over public education. There is sociological research (Preparing for Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools, Cookson Jr. and Persell) that has been done comparing private schools to public schools and it has revealed that a student from a private school getting some A's, B's and maybe one or two C's has a better chance of getting into an Ivy League than a well-rounded, A student from a public school -- simply because of the connections and the power that the private school has. Of course this is not applicable to all private schools (and that book was published in 1987 and may or may not be written from a biased perspective), but the general idea that I am trying to emphasize is that a great education should not be limited to those who can afford it. And the saddest part about that is that I think there is somewhat of a stigma with "lower-class" families (particularly in urban areas) regarding the level of ambition to even pursue an education, but when our urban education class visited these schools and talked with the students, many of them dreamed of going to college and had goals and ambitions to be a doctor or a lawyer or a pediatrician (and their reasoning was primarily to help their family out once they achieved this... imagine that), but their biggest concern was that they were not going to achieve that because of the cost. The thing that bothers me most about this is that there are a great deal of people who have careers in the medical and legal field with their own financially-driven motives or simply because of the prestige and here we were talking to little elementary school kids who talked about going to college and pursuing these careers with such an admirable and selfless attitude. So remind me again why we have such a hard time accepting education as a public good . . .
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