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Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

The elephant in the root is that the US already experimented heavily with a hybrid public/private model for educational delivery in its higher ed (colleges/universities) sector. Perverse competitive incentives on all fronts drive prices through the roof, quality stagnates/declines, and the downmarket options make impossible promises while offering curricula with such terrible outcomes as to be borderline fraudulent. When public funding is cut, it's replaced with debt, and people are deep under water to the investment class before they even start life.

I'm not here to defend the status quo, but reformers should carefully consider "how do we prevent turning American K12 into American higher ed."

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> Perverse competitive incentives on all fronts drive prices through the roof

I don't think it's been established that competitive incentives are driving the price through the roof. There are other theories, e.g. that massive increases in subsidization via guaranteed loans and other mechanisms are driving the price from the demand-side.

Sure, but if you are a private school charging $20k a year now, why wouldn't you charge $25k when every potential student gets a $5k voucher? Then we need to increase the size of the voucher to meet the original goals of the program. Rinse. Repeat.

Every child must either meet some government-mandated educational standard, or enroll in a program which brings some threshold percentage of its students to said standard. $VOUCHER_AMOUNT is adjusted on a per-region basis based on the average tuition within each region. If the institution's tuition is higher than $VOUCHER_AMOUNT, the parents pay the difference out of pocket. If the tuition is less than $VOUCHER_AMOUNT, the parents keep the difference.

Parents obviously want to minimize the amount they're paying out of pocket, and they'd like to keep some of the voucher money, so high-end schools as well as low-end schools are incentivized to keep their costs down.

Parents putting their kids in K-12 private school aren't optimizing for cost. They are optimizing for exclusivity and educational "quality". If their school just became more affordable to the unwashed masses, they will gladly pay the premium to keep them out.

That is true for some subset of wealthy parents, and if they want to pay extra for exclusivity, that's their choice. But I think it's reasonable to assume that the parents of the 90% of K-12 students who attend public or charter schools [1] are prioritizing cost over exclusivity.

It's true that many families will pay more to buy a house in a good school district, but I suspect that the school itself isn't the whole story: rather, many people interpret the school district's reputation as a proxy for the safety of the neighborhood and socio-economic status of its residents, as well as a proxy for their own socio-economic status.

Ulimately, I suspect that with the free market voucher system I described in my parent comment, legacy private schools would continue to charge outrageous tuition. But I think we'd also see some new, possibly virtual "bang for your buck" schools which would compete on price and which would be exclusive due to entrance exams and high academic expectations for enrolled students.

[1] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts...

> Parents obviously want to minimize the amount they're paying out of pocket

This spherical cow is fully confirmed by the higher ed market /s.

I'm not sure I follow. Many students/families choose community college for the freshman and sophomore years to minimize cost. Many opt for state universities over out-of-state/private universities for the same reason.

Well, you see, we take the naïve dupes who borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars in non-dischargeable, uncapped student loans for an MFA in film at Columbia, and extrapolate that to the rest of the population.

> I don't think it's been established that competitive incentives are driving the price through the roof.

I suppose the money for fancy facilities and armies of recruiting staff grew on a tree in the quad?

> There are other theories, e.g. that massive increases in subsidization via guaranteed loans and other mechanisms are driving the price from the demand-side.

As I stated,

>> When public funding is cut, it's replaced with debt

And, actually, that's the good outcome! The more realistic outcome is folks can't afford the price spiral and decide that Johnny doesn't need much more than a 6th grade education. Which I'm sure will bode well for our country.

> massive increases in subsidization

Vouchers are a subsidy, are they not? This "other theory" leads to the same conclusion.

An additional outcome in higher-ed was the perceived dilution of the religious characteristics of Catholic universities (a large portion of the prominent private universities) who took the money; the more-religious types complain about Jesuit schools, Notre Dame, etc. for being beholden to the whims of the state for so much of their funding that they cease to serve their mission, and their remaining supporters are mostly the ones who care about sports and the brand-value of the school name. For charter-schools at the secondary level, I'd expect the same kind of thing, only much faster.

Everyone who wants to understand this should read Tressie McMillan Cottom's Lower Ed: https://thenewpress.com/books/lower-ed

>>> The elephant in the root is that the US already experimented heavily with a hybrid public/private model for educational delivery...

And also for health care delivery.

And for the reconstruction of Iraq after Desert Storm.

In the college sector, the price ramped after Clinton signed law to prevent student loans being discharged in bankruptcy. And now parents co-sign and the parent's social security is sometimes taken to pay the child's non-dischargeable student loans. K-12 public school is government paid.

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