Munk Debates

Don't stop public funding of higher education. It's critical

Many of the things that students learn in college are essential for the very functioning of our democracy.

March 18, 2020

The following is adapted from the opening remarks made by Nicholas Dirks on a Munk Debates Podcast. Listen to the whole episode on universities here.

I’m a historian, so I’m going to provide a bit of background here to make my point about the importance of public funding for higher education.

One of the most important moments in American history was back in 1862 when president Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Moral Act, thereby making available funding on a theretofore unprecedented scale for the establishment of public institutions of higher education across the country, including the University of California at Berkeley, where I teach and where I was chancellor, until recently.

In my view, this really transformed American life. In the decades after that act, with the establishment of many flagship public institutions and others, increasingly funded by states, America began to develop the finest system of higher education anywhere on the globe, displacing Britain and Germany and becoming a system that is today the envy of the world and one which many other countries are seeking to replicate and then surpass.

It has been proven that students who go to college, as opposed to students who do not, make much more money across their careers. But it is also the case that many of the things that students learn in college are critical for the very functioning of our democracy, for the nature of civil society, for an understanding about the rudiments of science, and the fundamental factors that govern our planet.

Right now, as we find ourselves in the middle of a crisis around the global pandemic of COVID-19, we see a huge disparity between those who have some understanding of what a pandemic is and those who don’t. In this view, the benefits of a college education are not only beneficial for individual students, they are critical for societies and for the present situation we find ourselves in. I believe, given the transformation of our economy, and the steadily escalating nature of technology and its effect on the job market, a higher education will become more important in the future than it ever has been.

We also see considerable numbers of students from low-income backgrounds who benefit from higher education. In fact, students who come from the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum tend to benefit more than any other kinds of students in terms of the advantage that higher education affords them. Their access to high quality learning is another huge social good, and proves that public universities, both in terms of scale and in terms of the commitment they have to open access, perform a vital function for our society. Getting rid of public funding would actually exacerbate the socio-economic divide and make the few private universities that survive even more elitist than they are right now.

At the end of the day, I believe that one of the most important functions of government funding is education. If anything, we need to focus on educating our students better and learning from studies to see what works compared to some of the things we have done in the past. We can talk about ways in which we might want to improve education and I’ve been working for my entire life to do that. But everything from the technical, scientific, and engineering skills on the one side, to what are often called the soft skills — critical thinking, reading, literacy and civic learning — are important to maintaining a healthy, stable, and thriving democratic society. They constitute what we would call the public good and therefore are worthy of public funding.

Listen to the full episode here.