What Should Be the Role of America’s Public Colleges and Universities? - Reihan Salam, National Review

My views on higher education are very similar to my views on medical care: we suffer from excessive cost growth driven by credentialism, third-party payment, a lack of transparency, and overreliance on inefficient public institutions. Vance Fried of Oklahoma State University has offered the definitive critique of how federal higher education policy shapes this landscape. Razib Khan raises another interesting question: should public colleges and universities strive to offer the same complement of courses of instruction as elite private research universities, or should they, drawing on the land grant model, focus on STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) that are widely acknowledged as the best avenues for upward mobility for students from working and middle class backgrounds? At the heart of Razib’s argument is the view that public institutions should primarily devote themselves to facilitating upward mobility, and this in turn suggests an emphasis on STEM.