The Public Rationale of the Universities

The logic of this differentiated fee regime is that society, industry and the economy requires science, technology, engineering and other related subjects but the other subjects provide only personal goods or positional benefits to the user.

There is something both self contradictory and unsavory when politicians in democratic societies who have benefitted from open publicly funded education opportunities move to close down the flow of subsidized opportunities and thereby trash the democratic values at the root of public provision.

One of the ways in which universities will manage in this new cash strapped environment, argues Marginson, will be to thin out the quality of a degree.

Marginson explored some of the lesser considered,  long term impacts of this type of policy:

• the thinning out of access to important philosophical and social learning's and their limited exposure; and

• it has the effect of redefining universities not as public institutions for the public good but as another business selling a commodity.

When publicly created institutions such as universities come to stand for nothing more, nothing deeper or more collective, no greater public good than the aggregation of the set interest of a select part of the population when they come to exist only for themselves and those who use them, it is then that those institutions are vulnerable.

The neo-liberal vision of a world   of competitive markets, in which individuals and corporations pursue solely private interests - there will remain no real rationale for the continued existence of universities.

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