Adopt Market Education... or Else

Tom Friedman has an interesting Op-Ed in the NYTimes today, lamenting the fact that the U.S. is falling behind its international competitors educationally, and has no plan to deal with it. He writes:

[T]he percentage of Americans graduating with bachelor's degrees in science and engineering is less than half of the comparable percentage in China and Japan.... Anyone who thinks that all the Indian and Chinese techies are doing is answering call-center phones or solving tech problems for Dell customers is sadly mistaken. U.S. firms are moving serious research and development to India and China.

The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and the other is a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle against India, China, Japan and their neighbors. And while we are all fixated on the former (I've been no exception), we are completely ignoring the latter. We have got to get our focus back in balance....

Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, noted that Intel sponsors an international science competition every year. This year it attracted some 50,000 American high school kids. "I was in China 10 days ago," Mr. Barrett said, "and I asked them how many kids in China participated in the local science fairs that feed into the national fair [and ultimately the Intel finals]. They told me six million kids."

For now, the U.S. still excels at teaching science and engineering at the graduate level, and also in university research. But as the Chinese get more feeder stock coming up through their high schools and colleges, "they will get to the same level as us after a decade," Mr. Barrett said. "We are not graduating the volume, we do not have a lock on the infrastructure, we do not have a lock on the new ideas, and we are either flat-lining, or in real dollars cutting back, our investments in physical science."

What Friedman is either unaware of or underestimates is the increasing reliance that developing countries are placing on competitive non-government schooling. The total number of private schools in China doubled between 1996 and 2000, and the official government view (as reflected in state-run media) is that "government-run schools can't meet the needs of the public due to the large population of China." By every indication, private sector enrollment growth will continue to dramatically outpace that of the public sector in China for the foreseeable future.

India is even further along the market education road. In cities like Lucknow, the state capital of Uttar Pradesh, roughly 80% of students are estimated to attend private fee-charging schools even though both public schools and government-funded private schools are also available. Uttar Pradesh is on the vanguard of private school consumption in India, but even in rural areas much of the country makes heavy use of fee-charging private schools because the public schools are so bad. So long as the government schools remain corrupt enough and unresponsive enough, Indians will continue to consume private schooling in increasing numbers, and continue to enjoy ever-improving quality as a result. For the time being, most Indians can only afford very low tuitions and hence limited amounts/quality of private education. As their standard of living improves, however, their ability to consume higher quality schooling will also.

So here's our choice: we can stick with our grossly inefficient and generally poor public school system, or reintroduce market education and start ourselves on the path of educational improvement too. What'll it be?

Posted by Andrew Coulson at April 22, 2004 06:16 PM | TrackBack