The Case For National Universities
Noah Smith notes that America’s human capital stagnation has been accompanied by adrastic increase in the price of education that suggests a supply shortfall:
Which brings me to my idea of the day: A federally funded National University System.
When you have a supply shortage, one solution is to shift the supply curve to the right. Sometimes this is impossible. But in the case of U.S. public universities, it is very doable! Plenty of other countries have national university systems, and these national universities are often very high-quality. Why not us? Why don’t we build a system of high-quality,
