Every government on earth supports education., Bryan Caplan notes (in The Case Against Education):
They support it rhetorically with high praise, and financially with tax dollars. The ideal of “free and compulsory education”—schooling kids free of charge whether they like it or not—spans the globe.
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In a major international survey, clear majorities in every country favor bigger education budgets.
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In the General Social Survey, 74% favor more education funding, 21% favor the status quo, and only 5% favor cuts. Education enjoys bipartisan allegiance.
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Avowed opponents of Big Government make an exception for education: 60% of strong Republicans hew to the conventional pro-spending wisdom, and only 12% are contrarian enough to claim we overspend.
Even my fellow education critics normally argue against spending more, not for spending less.
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“We need to invest in people!” (Reply: We usually rely on the free market to provide crucial investments. We can do the same for education.) “Nothing is more important than education!” (Reply: Food’s more important, and we rely on the free market for that.) “Government has to make sure even the poorest children receive a good education!” (Reply: Means-tested vouchers can cheaply handle this problem. There’s no need for government to run schools or subsidize tuition for kids who aren’t poor.) Laymen’s arguments almost never confront the question, “At what point would education spending be excessive?” “We’ve done enough for education” is as heretical as “We’ve done enough for paralyzed veterans.”
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The Onion, the best parody site ever, once ran an article titled, “U.S. Government to Discontinue Long-Term, Low-Yield Investment in Nation’s Youth.”
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Since no government leaves education to the free market, there is no straightforward way to evaluate the case for the very existence of pro-education policies.
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A classic bumper sticker muses, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” By most measures, this great day arrived in the United States long ago. The air force may not hold bake sales, but total education spending far surpasses total military spending. For the 2010–11 school year, education was 7.5% of the American economy, versus 4.7% for defense. Spending came to over $ 1.1 trillion on education, and a bit over $ 700 billion on defense. Schools overtook the military back in 1972 and sharply widened their lead after the Cold War.
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$ 1.1 trillion a year is a royal sum—$ 1,100,000,000,000 in longhand. That’s nearly $ 3,600 for every person in America—not every student, mind you, but every person. Chanting “investment” doesn’t make it so. If half is wasteful signaling, we’re wasting over half a trillion dollars a year. And that’s only budgetary cost. A full damage report would include tens of billions of emotionally taxing, socially fruitless classroom hours.
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Like a rich uncle, government helps us waste. Whenever we can’t or won’t waste our own money on schooling, federal, state, and local governments are standing by to waste taxpayers’ money on our behalf.
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Direct federal education spending is hard to pin down, but probably small enough to ignore. Federal assistance to individuals, in contrast, exceeds $ 100 billion. Main complication: the federal government chiefly offers loans, not grants. If it charged market interest rates, you could claim student loans cost taxpayers nothing. Yet despite loud complaints about usury, even “unsubsidized” student rates are well below market. Loan guarantees have no visible upfront cost, but you probably don’t want to cosign my personal loans for free. The Congressional Budget Office finds an average subsidy rate of 12%: every dollar of student “loan” contains a hidden taxpayer gift of 12 cents.
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Many Americans imagine public education operates on a shoestring budget. Private education, in contrast, looks so pricey it’s implausible government does much to make it affordable. Both perceptions are wildly at odds with the facts.
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Government provides more than four-fifths of all education spending. Government support for education comfortably exceeds notoriously bloated defense spending. Even at the height of the War on Terror, there was more government money for education than the military. Government spending on education is about 6% of the whole economy.
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In 2010–11, government spent at least $ 565 billion on K through 12—that’s 87% of the total—and at least $ 317 billion on higher education—67% of the total.