When Can We Cut the Other 50%? - Granite Grok

When Can We Cut the Other 50%?

University of NewHampshire SealThere is a lovely new candidate survey being mailed out to New Hampshire candidates from the Concord Monitor.  While most of the questions are loaded to demarcate the right left divide in state politics–have to make sure we know who the “TEA Party Extremists” are–one question in particular stood out.

“Do you support last year’s 50% cut in university Funding…”

Absolutely.  When can we cut the rest of it?

How dare you?  Some of the highest paid “state employees” in New Hampshire rely on that money for“….for what?   To attract students to the high-value programs and career opportunities that a UNH degree guarantees, or is it possible that the State University system could do that without taxpayer money if we forced them to try?

Or put another way, why does the University need taxpayers to prop it up in the first place?   If the education they deliver is so valuable, people would be more than willing to pay what they charge, and given that the Federal government already has a monopoly college loan Ponzi-scheme in place to sustain the unrealistic cost structure, keep tuition’s high, enrollments up, and University payrolls higher, wouldn’t this be a great time to get even further away from the business of funding the majority left wing White-Tower education establishment here in the Granite State?

Oh, but less fortunate kids will never be able to afford an education…

They can’t afford a UNH education now.  They have been priced out of the system.   They (or their parents) have to mortgage a decade or more of their lives for whatever it is UNH has to offer–with taxpayer support.   Even indentured servants got off after seven years.   And it is becasue government intervention into this marketplace has overinflated the costs of that education.

If the University was serious about the relationship between cost and value, and they really cared about teaching kids instead of enriching professors and state union employees, they’d have found ways to come up with a cost curve that attracts a wider range of potential customers willing to exchange their own money for the promised product or service–in this case a degree in cow fart global systems analysis, or left-handed albino lesbian studies.

In the free market, if you try to sell things with no real value, the loss incurred when there is no market for them, causes them wither and die, removing them from the table and the costs associated with them.  That same process prevents a business from investing in the same kind of idiot notions in the first place, instead directing resources more efficiently and effectively which can also keeps costs down.

Free money (the annual taxpayer bailouts) simply warps the entire relationship between cost and value.  As long as taxpayers are providing free money to the State University system, the system has no incentive to seek the optimal price point where the actual value is equivalent to the cost charged.  As long as we are paying the salaries of the people deciding what works for them, we will never have an efficient system–it will always waste money–simply becasue these people have no incentive to seek the legitimate kind of profit model that would pay their exorbitant salaries–salaries which would change (up or down) to match their true value in the actual marketplace of ideas.

If the University cannot sell its product in the marketplace at the price it thinks it must charge,  then they must change the cost to meet perceived value or deliver a product worth the price of admission.

But as long as higher education in New Hampshire relies on free money to create opportunities, it will continue to charge too much for them. Only by cutting them back further, or cutting them loose, will they be forced to compete for real dollars, compete on costs, and on the quality of the product they offer in exchange.

Make UNH operate like a business, tax them like one, get their employees out of the public union–what of them there are; they can join it again if they think they can even afford it)–and then if you still feel guilty, use some of that tax money paid to us by UNH to promote scholarship programs for less-well monied students looking to partake of the UNH experience.  That’s the only type of taxpayer support I want to see–directly to worthy students in actual need, who are expected to use that money wisely, in a process managed by people elected to office for the purpose of oversight, instead of directly to a university system that will never try to control costs on its own.

 

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