☆☆四星级☆☆Economist Debates阅读写作分析--the cost of higher education

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http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/232

前言：

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结构：
1# about the debates & 介绍
2# background reading
3# opening statements
4# guest
5# guest
6# rebuttal statements
7# guest
8# guest
9# closing statements
10# decision
11# comments
12# comments
13# comments
14# comments
15# 汇总

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About this debate


Where does the lion's share （最大份额）of value rest when it comes to higher education? Is it with the individuals who reap the rewards of interesting work and higher salaries? Or is it the state, which will benefit from an educated society and competitive workers? In a globalised world where talent shortages are growing and highly educated individuals move freely between jobs and countries, has the balance of the benefit of higher education shifted from the state to the individual? If so, who bears the responsibility for paying for higher education?


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Defending the motion


Professor Alison Wolf Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management, King's College London

Individuals should certainly pay for their higher education. Anything else is deeply unfair to their fellow citizens.

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Against the motion


Professor Anders Flodström University Chancellor, Swedish National Agency for Higher Education

A nation is made up of individuals, who identify themselves with it. The nation stands for certain values agreed upon in, hopefully, a democratic way.

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Opening statements

Governments all round the world want more young people to go to university. They want growth, and are convinced that having more graduates will create it; they want social justice and hope that if lots and lots of young people go on to higher education, at some point universities will run out of middle-class students and start educating poorer youngsters whowill then become upwardly mobile.(是说这些贫困的孩子们得到较高的教育后将来在社会地位上有所提升)

But how to fund ever-increasing numbers of students? For Alison Wolf, the author of "Does Education Matter? Myths  about Education and Economic Growth", the prime beneficiaries of higher education are those who do it, and therefore the answer is simple: they should pay. She is keen on arrangements to ensure students are not put off by poverty or the fear of debt, but these are arguments, she says, for carefully designed student loan schemes, not for the taxpayer picking up the tab.(认为责任在于学生的贷款体制而非纳税人)

Our other participant, Anders Flodström, is head of Sweden’s National Agency for Higher Education. For him, education at every level is a joint endeavour between the citizens of a state. Higher education is certainly expensive, but it is part  of a country’s infrastructure, and common payment for infrastructure is one of the things that lie behind the Nordic dream of welfare for all and a classless society.（高等教育是一个国家下层构造的一部分每个人都应该为这个下层构造付出）

This promises to be a fascinating debate, and as moderator I hope to gain an insight into some questions I have come up against repeatedly while covering education for The Economist. First, a couple directed to those who want individuals to pay. If you believe in meritocracy, what can, or should, be done about the different aspirations of children born into different social classes? And what to do about the debt aversion of those whose families have no history of investing in  education? I once talked to some young men doing a very highly regarded apprenticeship scheme who told me they  would never have considered higher education. They didn’t  want to be “old” before they started to work—and, as they saw it, to live; you should have seen their faces when I told them I had spent eight years at university (I have a PhD).  And they were adamant they did not want to start out in life with debt—this despite Britain’s generous state-financed bursaries（政府赞助的公费） for poorer students and subsidised loans（补助贷款） for all. （举例探讨一部分学生持有的看法：他们认为没有负债继续高等教育是正确的选择 虽然英国政府有一系列慷慨的助学资金援助）

And now a couple of questions for those who think the taxpayer should pick up the tab. What about the over-consumption that is bound to follow when education is subsidised? If taxpayers pay for university, the young people who go may be receiving something they do not appreciate, and would not have bothered with if they had had to pay.

Many who are keen on subsidising education think, not without reason, that some people do not know what is good for them (and the rest of us), and hope, by cutting the price of education, to lure potential wastrels into lives that are in the end better for them and more all-round useful for others. Is such paternalism justified（这样的家长式作风是否合理）? And what of the motivation of these marginal students? Is higher education likely to be wasted on those who do not passionately desire to learn?

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Individuals should certainly pay for their higher education.Anything else is deeply unfair to their fellow citizens.

For the children of the middle classes, attending universityhas become a birthright. And a birthright that really pays.The economic returns to a degree are large and lifelong;graduates, everywhere, earn more than non-graduates.Meanwhile social mobility—indeed, any chance of getting agood job—is ever more dependent on having a degree.Forget making it up from the shop-floor. Without highereducation, doors everywhere slam in your face. （高学历的重要性）

Universities have expanded rapidly everywhere, but thebeneficiaries have been overwhelmingly middle-class. It isnot poor clever children who have been flooding into highereducation, but the children of the affluent, whether clever ornot. Yet bizarrely, in much of the world, governments seemdetermined that to those who have it shall be given. How else to explain the enormous proportions of public educationspending that are directed into higher education?（受教育群体）

Huge differences exist in the quality of schools, with the pooras the consistent losers. Developed countries are struggling,with little success, to narrow the income gap between theirmost and least advantaged citizens. In that situation, should ordinary people also be paying, through their taxes, for theuniversity education of the affluent young? Because that is what is actually involved when we say that the state shouldpay for higher education.(纳税人都付了钱 孩子们受到的待遇却不同)

  A university education is of enormous and direct benefit to the individual. A major reason for its value is that only somepeople have it. So the individual, and not the taxpayer,should pay for it. There are important and pressing calls on the resources of the government. Using taxpayers’ money tohelp a sub-set of young people to earn high incomes in thefuture is not one of them.  

Full government funding is not even very good foruniversities. On the contrary, it can be the kiss of death. Ifstudents have to pay for their education, they not only workharder, but also demand more from their teachers. And theirteachers have to keep them satisfied. If that means taking teaching seriously, and giving less time to their own researchinterests, that is surely something to celebrate.（学生的求知欲致使老师严谨的对待教学）  

Adam Smith worked in a Scottish university whose teacherslived off student fees. He also knew and despised 18th-century Oxford, where the academics lived comfortably offendowment income in an intellectual backwater. Guaranteedsalaries, Smith argued, were the enemy of diligence; andwhen the academics were lazy and incompetent, the studentswere similarly lackadaisical. In Scotland, with its fee-paying students and non-endowed staff, things were quite different.“Where the masters really perform their duty, there are no examples, I believe, that the greater part of the studentsever neglect theirs,” he argued. Scotland then, unlike now,made its students pay; and was also experiencing itsgreatest academic and intellectual flowering.  

If you want a Eureka moment, just look at the differencesbetween America’s public schools and its universities. Hugeamounts are spent on the schools, which nonetheless remainrelentlessly mediocre. American universities, meanwhile, arethe envy of the earth. That is in large part because they arecompetitive and have to earn their way. They have, in otherwords, to attract students and student fees. It is not just theprivate universities either. Public universities, too, chargefees; and students pay them.  

Fees also bring universities their independence. There aresome universities in the world which are fully, or almost fully, government-funded, and also independent in their views. Butnot many, and only in countries with a very strong, long-standing commitment to open debate. The general rule in lifeis that he who pays the piper calls the tune. And the historyof government-funded institutions is that they are not onlyinefficient but timid and cowed. This is no basis for good education or good research, and no way to preserve the corevalues of the academy: reason, critical thought, open-mindedness.（具有依赖性的由政府投资的大学常常与学术的本质所背离）  

Many people believe that higher education should be freebecause it is good for the economy, as proved by the fact that graduates are paid more . Many graduates clearly docontribute to national wealth, but so, even more clearly, do all the businesses that invest and create jobs, whether through a burger franchise or an internet start-up. If youbelieve that the state should pay for higher educationbecause graduates are economically productive, you shouldalso believe that the state should subsidise businesses.Anyone promising to generate jobs should receive a gift ofcapital from the government to invest.（这里是反驳毕业生给经济产生推动力 反驳点是论者的根据：给经济产生效益就该受到政府资助 论据：商人）

The money for business investors would presumably comefrom the same place as for students: the taxes of citizens,many of them less well paid. But actually the argument isnonsense. Both businessmen and university students want tomake themselves better off. They are entitled to the proceeds if they do. And so they should pay for theinvestment.   

Of course we need to make sure that poverty or fear of debtdoes not stop people from going to university. But there are well-worked out ways of doing that. In the UK, for example, we now have a system of income-contingent loans. Thegovernment lends all students, whatever their background,the money for their fees. They only start paying them backonce they are working and earning above a certain minimum.If things go wrong for someone and they are not able toearn, then they do not pay the loan back either.  

In many countries, universities also are the main home forresearch on anything without immediate commercial value. Research is a legitimate concern of government, but it is not the same thing as higher education. That is something which benefits individuals; and which they undertake because it benefits them. And therefore it is they, not the state, who should pay.（由于有些国家的大学是进行科研的重要场所 虽无法产生直接效益但是却使个人受益 我觉得这里可能有两方面受益 一是学生个人科研能力的提高 另一方面是学生作为国家公民享受科研成果带来的好处）

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A nation is made up of individuals, who identify themselveswith it. The nation stands for certain values agreed upon in,hopefully, a democratic way. The nation also agrees uponhow it can be competitive compared with other nations when it comes to increased prosperity and economic growth. The most important and generic quality for a nation is itsintellectual capital or its composed knowledge. All knowledgeis carried by individuals and also needs individuals to beapplied. Thus the collective knowledge growth is the mostimportant task for a nation.（从国家的整体角度讲知识积累的重要性 教育作为知识积累的重要手段成为了国家的责任）

The citizens of the nation have different talents andmotivations to learn. Non-students or students will through education increase their likelihood to succeed to get amotivating job, to become successful, to make a career, to make money and to live a full life from all aspects. As aperson you thus have a strong motivation to educate yourself as far as possible for your personal success. Your parents,relatives and friends encompass the same view andencourage you to study.

EducExcellent teachers are rare and are expensive and should beeven more expensive for the sake of learning. Who benefitsmost and thus who should pay? Developed nations in generalagree that all education up to tertiary or university education should be paid by the nation through taxes. When it comesto tertiary or university education, the view differs betweennations that share common democratic values. In the UnitedStates the answer is obvious; the students should pay, not the taxpayers. In the Nordic countries the answer is obvious:the taxpayers should pay. Why these very different views?The general attitude to the nation’s responsibility for thenation’s infrastructure is very different. In the United Statesthe only infrastructure that all citizens accept, that it should be paid by taxpayers is the infrastructure responsible for thenations, otherwise the financial responsibility for allinfrastructure should be shared federally, among the stateand among the individuals. Citizens take a much greaterresponsibility than in Europe and especially compared withthe Nordic countries. Consequently more money is left aftertaxes for wealth-building for individuals. The Americandream! In the Nordic countries society’s entireinfrastructure—transport, healthcare, schools anduniversities—is paid by taxes, resulting in high taxes. Thewelfare and classless society dream!（两种社会形态观念的差异）

Who is right? And more important who will be right in thefuture? The United States has the world’s greatestuniversities. Some of the best scientists work and some ofthe best students attend the best American universities. Will excellent university education for a few and expensivemediocre education for other students create the futureknowledge society? The answer is no. It will create ahierarchical society with diminishing social mobility, far from the American dream. Ivy League universities will receiveation and especially higher education is expensive.generous resources, from rich students and fromendowments, to create excellent but too few students. The average education level will become lower and in the end theAmerican university sector will suffer from similar problemsto the American healthcare sector. This higher educationsystem built on tuition fees will be counterproductive to theAmerican dream and will in the end result in a knowledgecrisis. There will in the future be no Indian or Chinesestudents to save—that is, bright and prepared to pay—the American universities, but America has to start to use its own multiethnic resources. A “no child left behind” legislation similar to the one for K-12 has to be enforced based onpublic, state and federal resources, and this resource must be used to create the future American knowledge society. （对美国未来的设想 我觉得不特别现实）

Is the Nordic taxpayer solution non-problematic? No. In thepolitical fight between competing tax-financed infrastructuresso far higher education and universities have been the losers.Roads and hospitals are more tangible to politicians and tovoters and compete better for the tax-based funding. This has resulted in much fewer resources to higher education, asa percentage of GDP, as compared with the United Statesand also the UK. Higher education in Nordic countries riskshaving great access to all its talents and with the possibilityto substantially increase its intellectual capital. However, thepresent tax-based funding is far too low to achieve thisobjective. Higher education in the Nordic countries risksbecoming very fair but with a far too low average knowledgelevel. Too low resources will also risk quality becauseteachers will become less stringent and motivated. Recently, the Swedish government increased the funding of universityresearch in a very significant way. Higher education is nowvery much the poor cousin. This will make a combined tax and tuition fee look attractive. A Nordic saga about equalopportunities and equal access to higher education couldend.

I believe; however, that knowledge is so important in thefuture that all countries need to put substantial tax money into higher education to be able to get a classless knowledgesociety that utilises the full power of the nation. I believe from my personal experience of Swedish students that themotivation for the individual students is as high and that thestudents are as competitive as students in other countriespaying for their university education themselves. If the nation is not prepared to pay for its most importantresource, we are in trouble.

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The core problems of higher-education finance are clear:many universities are underfunded, many students are poorand the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds is a major concern. Higher-education finance matters: getting it wrong puts national economic performance at risk and sells the poor down the river（欺骗了穷困的学生 sell down the river 欺骗出卖）. There is also considerable agreement about core objectives:strengthening quality and improving access.   

The policy to achieve those objectives has three elements.

Element 1: Variable fees to enhance quality. Variable fees are highly controversial in western Europe but taken for granted in the United States and many countries in Asia. There are several arguments.

•    Cost sharing: it is a standard principle in economic theory that it is both efficient and fair if individuals pay for the private benefits they derive (higher pay, more satisfyingwork), and the taxpayer finances social benefits above those private benefits.

•    Quality: fees give universities more resources to improve quality and, through competition, help to improve the efficiency with which those resources are used. Why the emphasis on competition? The answer from economic theory is that competition is useful where consumers are well-informed. In the case of higher education, the model of the well-informed (or fairly well-informed) consumer broadly holds. Thus competition, with suitable regulation, benefits the student.

•    Paradoxically, variable fees are also fairer. Most students are from better-off backgrounds; thus with ”free” higher education the taxes of the truck driver pay for the degrees of people from better-off backgrounds. The obvious counter-argument is that fees harm access. That is true of upfront fees（应当是指在学生未毕业前的费用）, but not where students go to university free and make a contribution only after they have graduated. This brings us to student loans.   

Element 2: Sharing costs without harming access. Student loans should have two central characteristics. They should have so-called income-contingent repayments. That is, a person’s repayments should be x% of his/her earnings,implemented as payroll deduction which stops once he/she has repaid the loan. This is the system in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Second, the loan should be large enough to cover tuition fees and living costs.  Such a package has profound implications. It eliminates upfront fees, making higher education free at the point of use. It frees students from forced reliance on credit-card debt, and allows them to choose how much part-time work they do, or do not do.   

Element 3: Policies to widen participation. Exclusion has multiple roots. A well-designed strategy addresses them all.

•    Raising attainment: access fails when someone drops out of high school, usually for reasons that started much earlier.A central element in widening participation is to strengthen pre-university education, from nursery school onwards.

•    Increasing information and raising aspirations: activities include mentoring of school children by university students, visit days, Saturday schools and the like, so as to demystify （透明化）university and give school children relevant information. The saddest impediment to access is someone who has never even thought of going to university.

•    More money: policies include financial assistance to schoolchildren to encourage them to complete high school and scholarships for students at university. The latter,however, are the tail; it is attainment that is the dog.  In a UK context, spending £1bn raising the school-leaving results of the 80% of young people from poor backgrounds who do not go to university is a better way of widening access than subsidising the tuition fees of the 80% from better-off backgrounds who do.   Most countries in mainland western Europe and the Nordic countries have yet to address the vexed politics of fees. This is regrettable. The strategy above simultaneously enhances quality and increases fairness. It is educationally, socially, fiscally and administratively sound. It should form the core of any reform proposals.

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The proposition as stated is so extreme as to be absurd,whether considered abstractly as a philosophical principle, orconcretely as a policy proposal. The apparent assumption isthat higher education is a purely private good, like an automobile, and thus should be bought and sold as onewould a Mercedes or Land Rover. But no country in the worldcurrently treats higher education in this fashion; indeed, if one were to consider the opposite extreme, full statesubsidy, one could point to examples in recent history.Where most countries find themselves now is somewhere inbetween these two extremes, and the realistic discussioninvolves how the costs should be shared between individualsand the state, not whether they should be shared.

Why have all states subsidised higher education to somedegree? Higher education has long been viewed byeconomists as investment in human capital, required toenhance the productivity of individuals, both in themarketplace and as citizens of the community. The benefitsproduced are both private and public, a classic example ofexternalities. The fact that educated people earn moreincome is reason for them to bear much of the cost, but ifany state left the total of such investment to the pure,unsubsidised market, the amount of education purchasedwould fall short of the socially optimal level. This is an efficiency argument, and although calculating the preciseshares of public and private benefits eludes us, societieseverywhere have found it in their interest to encourage moreeducation than the market alone would produce.

Year ago the Carnegie Commission under Clark Kerr’sleadership wrestled with this question, and concluded that the individual should pay one-third of the cost of education,the state or private philanthropy the remaining two-thirds.When forgone earnings—a cost borne by the individual—arefactored in, they argued that the balance overall shifted totwo-thirds of cost falling on the individual, one-third on thestate. While one could quibble with the balance they struck,this allocation appears to be in a sensible range. What has become increasingly clear to all economists is that higher education is a key (if not the key) economic resourcefor all countries in a global economy. The United Statesadopted mass higher education a generation before mostother countries—and Americans benefited greatly from that first-mover advantage—but many other OECD countries havenow caught up or surpassed that level of participation andcompletion. To adopt a policy of zero state subsidy andresulting full-cost tuition would be an economic death knellfor any country so foolish as to consider that move. Whiledemand for higher education is generally price-inelastic, it isnot perfectly inelastic, and thus higher prices to the individual would reduce demand at precisely the time when most countries seek the opposite outcome.

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In their rebuttals, both our speakers consider how to ensure high-quality higher education. Alison Wolf seizes on her opponent’s admission that if the state pays, it may simply be too stingy. With so much competition for tax money, would state-financed higher education be able to maintain quality as enrolments soar? Britain provides a pointed example: some of its most illustrious universities are in Scotland, which runs its own education affairs, and has decided to keep higher education completely free. Its universities got far less money than they hoped for from the exchequer this year, and face falling well behind their rivals in England, which receive student fees as well as government grants. Scottish students may be grateful now—but if their universities enter into a slow decline, will their free education still seem like such a bargain?

For Professor Flodström the most important point in maintaining the quality of higher education is the quality of the young people who embark on it. He thinks that students who must pay will treat education like a mode of transport to the future, and prioritise speed and efficiency over the quality of the ride. He raises an interesting new point: good students benefit their teachers and fellow students as they learn, not just their societies once they have finished. Is this externality enough to make it worth paying them to study?

Neither speaker has raised a question I would be keen to see discussed: regardless of whether the government should pay for higher education, should it cap the cost? Do the top-tier American universities really need to charge so astonishingly much—or are they doing so because their fabulous reputations put them in a seller’s market and, moreover, extremely high fees are widely regarded as a sign of quality? To echo Professor Flodström, are their illustrious names attracting great students, whom they can then use to market themselves and capture an economic benefit provided by them?

There have been many interesting comments from the floor. A few people have said that if citizens should have to pay for their own higher education, they should have to pay for their health care too. For some, this is a serious suggestion; others are trying to show the absurdity of our proposition: “Let’s all pay also for secondary education, primary education and—why not?—health care. Back to the good old Victorian times!” writes Dianoia.

Professor Wolf distinguishes between the two thus: none of us know what our future health needs will be, and if we are unfortunate they may be onerous. So for all but the richest among us, paying for health care will require some element of insurance. By contrast, each individual is best placed to understand his own educational needs and desires, and the cost is transparent and limited.(健康作类比)

I was particularly struck by a comment that higher education should be free to the student, but that entry requirements should be very rigorous. That way no really deserving candidates would be put off by fear of poverty, but the waste of providing higher education to candidates who are only marginally interested would be avoided. That would lead to another sort of elitism: one that excluded the less talented rather than the less monied. On the face of it, this is attractive, but what to do about the fact that high-school grades and performance on standardised tests are closely linked to socio-economic status?

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In his passionate defence of the Nordic model, Professor Flodström notes that its higher education “risks becoming very fair but with far too low average knowledge level”. He thereby helps me to explain why this motion should be carried. Practical necessity requires that individuals pay for higher education which is worth the having. It is not just fair, but unavoidable.

All over the world, higher education has moved from an elite to a mass pursuit. In the process, its total cost has exploded. Before the war, most European countries sent only 2-3% of their young people to university; as late as the 1960s, it was less than 10%; today, figures of around 50% are normal. This reflects the legitimate and admirable aspirations of democratic citizens for themselves and for their children. No government could survive that tried to go back to a tiny elite system; nor should it.（时间的纵向对比）

But this enormous expansion leaves governments with just two basic choices. If they resist fees, they ineluctably find themselves with a system of overcrowded lecture halls, overstretched facilities and plummeting standards. Spending per student fails completely to keep pace with numbers.

Countries such as Germany and Italy are all too familiar with this scenario. It is why German university rectors have been so determined to keep the federal government out of higher-education policy. That gives reformist German states and universities the chance to grapple with improving quality, raising money and the need for fees.（意大利和德国的例子　政府拨款的代表）

France has responded rather differently, by running two completely different systems in parallel. The tiny elite one, of the grandes écoles, is well-funded, but sits alongside a mass university system starved of funds. That approach is one way of maintaining some quality, while keeping education free. But I doubt if it meets Professor Flodström’s definition of fairness, and it certainly does not meet mine.（法国两手抓）

The Nordic countries’ commitment to high taxes and to education means they have kept quality pretty high until now; but as my opponent admits, the strain is starting to tell. And if we look at the world as a whole, the picture is very clear. Governments that set their faces against making students pay thereby choose the path that leads to low-quality mass education.

（北欧国家的例子
以低质量的大众教育来妥协平衡政府拨款）

The other choice is to make individuals pay. America grappled with the funding of mass higher education earlier than the rest of the world, because it offered it sooner. It is able to support a mass system which also provides high quality because, and only because, it accepts individual contributions as normal and right. Nor is it alone. Other countries, including England, Australia, Japan and New Zealand, operate university systems to which individuals’ fees make a major contribution. They do so in large part because they cannot see any other way to maintain quality in the education they offer.

This does not mean that individuals have always to pay the entire cost of their higher education. It certainly does not mean that they have to pay it all in full, upfront, from their own pockets, as soon as they start to study. On the contrary. That is not the practice of the United States nor, indeed, of my own fee-paying country, England. (Scotland, please note, is different.)

My opponent offers something of a caricature of American higher education. This is the home, after all, of the University of California, the most hugely admired of public university systems. Texas, butt of so many European sneers, is enormously generous to its state university. Overall, America spends a very large amount of public money on higher education (as, by the way, it does on health). But it combines this with major contributions from individuals, which they pay because what they are buying—higher education—is worth a great deal to them, individually.
Professor Flodström invokes national solidarity, and the importance of being a citizen; of contributing to your society, and knowing that your fellow-citizens will correspondingly feel a duty to you. So being educated means that you can give more, as well as gain more; and in return, your fellows should be happy to pay for your education through their high taxes.

The Nordic model is an extraordinary as well as an extraordinarily successful one. In other countries, we tend to admire it greatly while wondering just how much of a lesson it can offer to places that are not simply bigger but far more heterogeneous. But however great the solidarity people feel with each other, there has to be a practical, financial limit to what they will pay for on others’ behalf. Higher education is not the only thing, and may well not be the first thing, that citizens wish to support in the cause of common nationhood.

Health care, income support if we are unemployed, help at home when we are aged or disabled, are not merely things we feel society should provide to everyone. They are also very hard if not impossible for individuals to provide for themselves, even through insurance schemes. The state has to be involved.（又是医疗体系的对比）

By contrast, with the right funding and loan systems, people can finance their higher education; can make repayments without undue strain; and do. When England first introduced substantial fees for students, doom-sayers predicted that there would be a big drop in student numbers. The opposite has occurred; nor is there any evidence that poorer students have been deterred or driven away. After all, while a country with many highly educated and productive people is a generally better place to be than one without, the immediate financial benefits of higher education go into the pockets and bank accounts of its graduates.（拿英国来举例
个人交学费并没有出现升学率降低的明显现象）

In that respect taxing people for higher education is quite different from taxing them for health, welfare or, indeed, infrastructure. Politicians are quite right to give the latter priority. My opponent’s solution to maintain quality in higher education is yet higher taxes on the general population. Mine remains the just and efficient policy of asking individuals to pay.

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A few years ago, I had a debate with the ministers of education from Sweden and the UK about who should pay for higher education: the students or the taxpayers. From a political viewpoint, I had expected a minister from the Labour Party and a minister from the Social Democratic Party to share a common view. On the contrary, the Labour Party minister was very much in favour of the tuition fees that had just been introduced in the UK while the Social Democratic minister stated that, in Sweden, tuition fees for Swedish, as well as for European, students were unthinkable. The Labour Party minister thought the difference of opinion was very illuminating and it reflects the other side of Alison Wolf’s argument about tuition fees.

In a society with a clear social hierarchy or class system, it is easy for a Labour Party minister to argue that the working class should not, through taxation, pay for the education of middle-class students of average ability. Exceptionally talented working-class students will always succeed in industry, academia or society. Scholarships will be provided. A scholarship and tuition fee system will conserve existing hierarchical social systems and will not create the social mobility necessary to increase the nation’s intellectual capital. In a more classless society such as in the Nordic countries, dynamism and the increase of the nation’s intellectual capital is guaranteed by access to higher education for all students independent of class and economic background. Still, parents and friends influence students’ choice of education and career. However, these choices are not primarily determined by parental income. The economic, social and personal rewards might be somewhat less in the Nordic countries than in the US and the UK, but they are enough to motivate the students as individuals. Does quality increase if students buy their education? Students, like other consumers, are not always rational in their choice of education and do not always look for quality. Status is probably more important: Cambridge University and BMW or Gothenburg University and Volvo? I am quite sure that the talent and social mix of students making the latter choice is as good as the former, if not better. What perhaps is more important for the quality of higher education is that teachers know they have a cohort of students who are educating themselves because they are talented and motivated and not for any other reason.

Students paying tuition fees will look upon university studies as a form of transport. They pay for this and should make the journey as quickly and easily as possible in order to take advantage of the social and economic benefits awaiting them. This will create universities with a uniform philosophy about higher education. New pedagogy, new methods, reflection and learning by research experience will be demoted and efficiency will be promoted. It is sometimes argued that tuition fees sometimes give universities financial freedom, but freedom from what?

Universities and their research and teaching are the most important part of every nation’s knowledge infrastructure. Every individual with talent and motivation should have as easy an access as possible to higher education, for the benefit of the individual and the nation.

素年锦时UID: 2610749

Government is in the higher-education business to advance the public good, but what it creates overall is a painful public loss.

Consider U.S. states' support for public colleges and universities. Many of the motives for maintaining state schools are laudable, including desires to increase human capital through low-price education, or to establish hubs for innovative state and regional economies. In practice, however, these efforts are often wasteful. Funding for specific institutions or projects, for instance, is frequently influenced by lobbying prowess, not just public need. Schools are often incorporated into hidebound state bureaucracies, making nimble responses to changing demands, or administrative efficiency, impossible. And because taxpayers shoulder so much of schools’ costs—states and localities spent $6,773 per full-time-equivalent student in 2007—students demand things they would baulk at were full costs reflected in tuition.

The net outcome of state-funded higher education is negative. As the economist Richard Vedder has shown1, other things being equal, the more states expend on higher education, the lower their rates of economic growth. Individuals know their needs and attend to them more effectively than politicians, so leaving money in their hands produces the best overall results.

An even bigger problem than government subsidies to institutions is generous aid to students, which between 1986 and 2006 rose from $3,967 per full-time equivalent student to nearly $9,500. Quite simply, the more that students draw on other people’s dollars, the more they can demand and colleges can charge. In light of that,（考虑到此） it is no wonder that colleges and universities are suffering from administrative bloat, facility underutilisation and teaching neglect. They are also coming more and more to resemble theme parks or cruise ships, with deluxe residence facilities, dining halls serving gourmet food and such whoppers瞒天大谎 as the University of Missouri’s Tiger Grotto indoor water park and Ohio State’s Tom W. Davis Climbing Center, which features “25 top-rope routes, eight lead routes, overhangs, cracks, jugs, arêtes, dihedrals, crack climbing, a roof, and a bouldering cave!”

Overall, the results of massive student aid are somewhat increased accessibility, tons of wasted money, and perverse, unintended consequences. Full-time-equivalent college enrolment has risen about 52% over the last two decades, but inflation-adjusted tuition and fees have leapt 85% at four-year private schools and 129% at four-year publics. Real, total aid volume has exploded nearly 263%, from $36.0 billion to $130.5 billion. Perhaps worst of all, it is the poor who have been most hurt by aid-fuelled tuition inflation, with assistance increasingly skewed towards higher-income students, as prices have risen, and the poor feeling most priced out.

Fortunately, there is a solution to these problems: Phase out government support for higher education. It simply is not needed. The average, lifetime earnings premium for a bachelors’ degree in the U.S. is around $800,000, more than enough to encourage private lenders to offer conventional or income-contingent loans to promising students. Combine that with the deflationary effect that ending government support is almost certain to have, and affordability should not be much of a problem for students with real potential.

All of the costs that come with government funding attest to why individuals, not the state, should pay for higher education. Quite simply, when we take from Peter to educate Paul, Paul buys more than he otherwise would, and Peter is less able to address his true needs. An overall loss, not a public gain, is the ultimate result.

素年锦时UID: 2610749

Both the individual and the state should pay for higher education. The exact split should be determined by country-specific factors. Sadly, there is a tendency for ideology to overpower reason when it comes to the question of who should pay for higher education. This is in particular the case with some of my interlocutors from both sides of the aisle best exemplified by the left-leaning University Rector from Latin America on the one side, and the free-market-loving Chicago-educated economist on the other.

To the left-leaning University Rector, I agree that the state should contribute, while stressing why the individual should also pay for higher education.
o    Private returns to higher education are high and increasing. In OECD countries, workers with higher education earn 51% more than workers with secondary education. In the developing world, this gap is significantly higher. For instance, in India, a university graduate earns, on average, 86% more than a graduate from secondary education. Further, the gap has increased substantially in the last decade due to rapid economic growth and technological change. Therefore, many graduates will earn salaries that allow them to repay the cost of their education.
o    In many developing countries, the state ends up subsidising the education of children from rich families. With all likelihood, a large proportion of these children would have gone to university without this subsidy.
o    Given competing demands on the state’s scarce resources, state funding to ensure that every child learns to read and write should be prioritised over funding to higher education.
o    When the individual pays, he/she considers in depth whether the investment is worthwhile. He/she puts more efforts into learning, and is more likely to finish his/her studies on time.
For example in Rwanda, why should the state pay education and living costs amounting to 37% of its education budget for the benefit of only 2% of a youth cohort of which a large share comes from the 20% richest households, when more than 60% children do not complete primary education?
But I argue with the free-market-loving economist that there exist market failures that explain why the state should make targeted investments in higher education:
o    Low-income students are not able to afford full-cost higher education, in particular in developing countries. Individuals in developing countries pay on average 61% of GDP per head per year for higher education (compared with only 30% in developed countries). Without publicly supported student loans, few low-income families are able to sink in over half of their annual income on just one child.
o    Higher education has a number of benefits to society that goes beyond the benefit to the individual. Foremost, it can boost technological innovations and their diffusion. Second, if your neighbour or colleague is highly skilled, he/she improves your productivity, adaptability and health behaviour. Third, highly skilled manpower fuels progress in key sectors, such as agriculture, education, health, environment and art. In these sectors, the returns to education are low, but their contribution to society and well-being is large.
o    In countries with high tax rates, the government reaps a large part of the benefits of higher education, so to restore the incentive of higher education for the individual the state equally has to pay for a large share of the costs. A state subsidy to higher education transfers a large share of the risk of academic and labor market failure from the individual to the state. This is in particular the case for the Nordic countries, where the State pays for 94% of the cost of higher education (compared with 53% in Anglo-Saxon countries).
Consider the case of Colombia, where over 65% of students attend private institutions and public universities charge tuition fees. Higher education costs the family 64% of GDP per head, making it unaffordable for the low-income students. Enrolment in higher education among low-income families is five times lower than among high-income families. Shouldn’t the state make a targeted investment in student loans to poor students?

So when you vote to side with either the left-leaning University Rector from Latin America or the free-market-loving Chicago economist, please know that they both have a point, but represent extremes. Both the individual and the state should pay for higher education.

素年锦时UID: 2610749

The clarity and passion of our speakers' statements makes any attempt of mine to summarise their arguments superfluous. So instead I will use my closing remarks to say something about the wording of our proposition and to tell an anecdote, hopefully illuminating.

First, the proposition. Quite a few of the comments from the floor have been critical of it for being too black-and-white: neither students nor taxpayers should pay the entire cost of higher education, they say; rather, it should be shared. Of course, to be provoking is one of the jobs of a proposition, and in fact both our speakers do address this point. Everywhere, says Alison Wolf, governments do indeed pay at least part of the cost; the only live question is whether students should contribute too, to which she answers, yes. Anders Flodström, whose home country, Sweden, asks students for no money at all, muses about a "pragmatic recipe" which would have taxpayers paying one-third, the rest to be shared between graduates in work and the employers who hire them.

Now for the anecdote. When I was a PhD student at University College London in the 1990s, a friend was studying sculpture and performance at the Slade, one of the world's most renowned schools of fine art. Student fees were then being mooted in England, and one evening in the bar she said to me quite passionately that if she had had to pay fees, she would never have done her degree.

The conversation moved on before I could ask her why, and I have thought of her comment repeatedly during this debate. She enjoyed her course, so it was not that it had turned out to be a disappointment. She worked hard and, as far as I could tell (my PhD was in mathematics), she was very good.

So was she speaking from an unexamined sense of middle-class entitlement? In which case, the obvious response would be: if you don't think your course was worth paying for yourself, why on earth should taxpayers, few of whom could afford the luxury of three years spent making art, pay for it for you?

Or perhaps she simply meant that if she had had to pay fees, she could never have justified making such a desperately unlucrative decision. I am sure she added little or nothing to her expected lifetime earnings by studying fine art, which, by the by, highlights the fact that the issue of who should pay cannot always be finessed by offering loans to be repaid once graduates start work. The chances are that had she taken such a loan it would never have been repaid (last I heard, after graduating she had moved to a campsite with some other artists and was living on the dole). Then the question becomes: do the rest of us think it is worth paying for her, and others like her, to study? This is thrown into particularly sharp relief by my friend's example, in which the benefit of her studies to the rest of us are most unlikely to be financial.

（援助的资金是否对受教育者有帮助纳税人是否愿意为这样的受教育者纳税两个角度讨论问题）

It remains for me to thank our speakers, our six guests and not least the hundreds of readers who commented from the floor. The debate has been both fascinating and thought-provoking, and the question it raises is both live and extremely important. One of the defining characteristics of our times is a huge expansion of higher education, only now starting to slow in rich countries and to take off in developing ones. The choices made in countries such as India and China about how to pay for that expansion will shape higher education in the coming century. Will they be the right ones?

陈词这一部分应当是最关键的正反两方会将自己的思路整理出来系统的再次支持自己的论点

素年锦时UID: 2610749

All governments are involved in and support higher education. So the only live question is whether individuals should also contribute. I think it is bad for universities, as well as morally indefensible, if students do not pay. However, to repeat what I have said from the very beginning, that does not mean they should all be paying the full amount in cash, upfront, with no assistance. No one anywhere follows this approach; it is not a genuine policy option. （首先摆明
论题并非是个人付全部费用和政府负全部费用
而是在政府必然提供援助的情况下
个人付费还是不付费的问题）

My opponent believes that university students should receive their education totally free (or rather entirely at the taxpayers’ expense). This is a policy which countries do indeed follow; in Sweden, we are told, tuition fees are ‘unthinkable’. It is also a policy I strongly oppose. Higher education is not like primary and secondary education, as some comments on this debate suggest, because only some people go to university. They are overwhelmingly from better-off backgrounds; they benefit individually, in a multitude of ways; and they should contribute directly towards the privileges they are being given. （付出与回报应当成正比）

Let me ask Professor Flodström a question. If Swedish students contributed to the cost of their higher education, might that not both preserve the quality of the country’s universities, and free up money to address pressing social problems? He has admitted his concerns about the former; and even with Swedish tax rates, there are endless calls on state funds. A particularly relevant issue in this context would be Swedish immigrants’  inability to get jobs that match their education levels. （提出问题）

The Nordic countries have higher social mobility than other countries (or, to be specific, than the rather few countries for which we actually have good data). But nowhere is paradise; and Sweden compares rather badly with other parts of northern Europe on its record of integrating immigrants into the labour market. In the UK, for example, foreign-born workers with higher education are almost as likely as the native-born to be doing highly skilled jobs; whereas in Sweden there is a very large gap between the two groups in the sorts of jobs they hold. （此消彼长）

Of course, there will be a number of complex factors at work; just as there for one of the UK’s most pressing problems, namely the failure of many schools in poorer areas to bring students up to university entrance standard. It is why, to quote Nick Barr , one of this debate’s featured guests, many of us in the UK think it is better to spend “£1 billion on the 80% from poor backgrounds who don’t go to university’” than on covering the entire cost of tuition for those who do.

My point is that there are always social problems to be addressed, always difficult choices to be made about where to spend tax revenues. I find it impossible to believe that Sweden, or any other country, has so few calls on its resources that it can rule out entirely having students pay towards their higher education. Are all the things that are not done, in that situation , really less important than giving people like me, and most Economist readers, a completely free ride through university?

I cannot possibly respond to all the comments made, but let me finish with a few specific points. The motion is, indeed, phrased in an absolute way; and many people who are voting against it seem to be voting against the idea that individuals should pay the full cost and the state contribute nothing. That is not my position: but my opponent does, it seems, believe that the state should pay everything and the individual nothing at all. Nothing he or anyone else has said seems to me to justify that position. （表明立场　指出对方漏洞）

Of course we can and should guarantee access to people who are poor, through loans, scholarships and bursaries, and the like. Those are especially important for students from poor families who are very understandably debt-averse. But there is an enormous difference between ensuring that people pay only when and as they can, and not asking for any payment at all.

Second, in response to the moderator’s comments, I personally believe very strongly that people can and do make very sensible decisions for themselves, far better than others make on their behalf, and that all the evidence bears this out. If people have to face up to (some of) the costs of higher education, their education choices will be more reasoned and more reasonable. But I am slightly puzzled by the example she gives of the two apprentices, who seem to have made perfectly sensible decisions, and found themselves something they enjoyed with excellent career prospects. What does bother me is the way that higher subsidies for university than for apprenticeship may distort people’s choices, and the way in which some jobs are becoming, quite unnecessarily, open to graduates only. That means people can feel almost forced to go to university even when they do not really want to, to their and the taxpayers’ cost. （政府的援助反而对学生产生了一种驱动力
学生本身并不一定想接受高等教育）

Finally, I do, of course, agree strongly with those comments that emphasise that we appreciate what we have to pay and work for. I am horrified, at a personal level, by how little I appreciated the real cost of my own “free” university education when I was a student, and by how I took for granted that I had some sort of right to it. It is also striking that students who pay tend not only to be more engaged and more demanding, but that differences persist after graduation. The amounts that alumni give to their old universities suggest that paying for our education makes us more grateful, and more generous, too. So please vote in favour of the motion, for the sake of universities everywhere.

素年锦时UID: 2610749

University research and education are increasingly the cornerstone 基石　for the progress of mankind. Almost everything “new” or “improved” in areas such as the environment, health care, economic growth, technology, media, culture and communication, originates in university research and is implemented by professionals educated at universities. The new products, new services and new infrastructure lead to a better quality of life for most people. The role of universities in this knowledge society is vital and fundamental. The integration of universities into the rest of the society is fostering a new university paradigm, “the triangle of knowledge”. Through the innovative process, researchers, teachers and students prepare nations for global competition and promote new sustainable global infrastructures in the fields of energy, the environment, food supply and communication.

Who will pay for the university-educated professionals required by society? Everyone gains from the work of these professionals, not least the professionals themselves. On average, they have more interesting and well-paid jobs and have easier access to power than the rest of society.

Somehow, it is easier to discuss a pragmatic algorithm about who should pay for further or higher education once a student is in employment. The pragmatic recipe would be one-third by the student because of personal gain, one-third by the student’s employer because of company gain and one-third by the taxpayers because of the benefit to society. The presence of the employer moderates the ideological discussion and makes it easier to discuss costs and benefits from a contractual viewpoint.这是对未来的一个预期
但是学生在未能产生经济价值之前是无法衡量的

In the United States, tuition fees are set by the market; in England tuition fees are capped and supplement government funding; and in the Nordic countries higher education is free for the students. In all countries, students invest time and energy in the learning process for the benefit of themselves and for the benefit of society. After meeting young students in many countries, my view is that students wish to use their acquired knowledge to further their own careers and also in the service of society. A nation’s progress rests on maintaining a sustainable knowledge society independent of how it is paid for. If a nation fails to create a competitive knowledge society for the nation’s citizens the consequences are devastating. Perhaps we should rather debate how, as a nation, as part of Europe and as a global partner, we can produce students and universities of excellent quality. What are the means and what is the cost?　同志们　知识就是力量！！

How education is financed influences the kind of universities and students we produce. If students pay for their education they have different demands on universities from students attending public-funded universities. My view is that student fees must be balanced by public funding. A constructive co-ownership and a constructive discussion about the quality and employability of students are necessary and should be part of a vital democracy.

In a higher-education system financed by tuition fees, the market plays a vital role. In an ideal market, niches exist for all kinds of universities with different educational ideas and philosophies and, to stay competitive, they produce graduates that meet the demands of employers. Where European students are not interested in science and engineering studies, Chinese and Indian students are. They move to Europe to get their education and choose to study subjects that provide the possibility to acquire the best jobs in Europe or in their home countries. This is the way the United States has created a diversified and excellent workforce for industry and for research. No one can dispute all the Nobel prizes resulting from this philosophy.

The global education market has been developing rapidly. Previously, the majority of students moved between countries and universities on exchange programmes. Now, students who are able to pay for their tuition move independently to study the best programmes at the best universities located in English-speaking countries. Until very recently, it was thought that tuition fees, first for foreign students and later for domestic students, would solve the financial problems facing universities and save the taxpayers and politicians money. It would also make a nation’s labour market independent of the domestic students’ lack of interest in areas of vital importance for the nation. The buzzword was globalisation.

However, due to the financial crisis, the market is no longer seen as a universal solution for all sectors of society. On the contrary, we seem to want to put our trust in a strong state that will use common resources to remedy the failures of the market. Governments should take more responsibility, including funding higher education.

There is a possibility for an educational market failure, leaving Europe and the United States with an intellectual capital crisis in areas vital for future industrial and infrastructure development. It is a national responsibility to ensure that we have enough teachers, engineers, economists and doctors. It is a national responsibility that everyone with interest and talent can educate themselves.

素年锦时UID: 2610749

Both individuals and the state have a responsibility to pay for higher education. When we examine the returns received from investments in higher education, we see that it is both the individuals who attend college or university, as well as society in general, that benefit. Thus, investments in higher education should be shared between individuals and the state.还是汇报和投入的比例问题

Individuals who continue their education past the secondary level receive the primary benefit of increased human capital, which results in higher earnings in labour markets. The skills, general knowledge and experience learned while in college are valued by employers. This is particularly true in the 21st-century economy, which puts a premium on higher-order skills that can be obtained only through post-secondary education. In the United States, as well as in other countries, there are fewer and fewer jobs that provide the salary and benefits necessary to enjoy what is often called a middle-class lifestyle that one can obtain without investing in post-secondary training.（个人在受教育后所获得的好处以及缺乏的弊端）

But it is not just individuals who benefit from the investment in post-secondary education. Thomas Jefferson, the chief author of the United States' Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the United States, wrote: "A democratic society depends upon an informed and educated citizenry." In his age, one could become "informed and educated" with relatively few years of formal schooling. Today, however, some form of post-secondary education is a requirement for many to be active and engaged citizens in society. One need only look at the complexity of the economic crisis facing the world today to know that an informed voter has to have a fairly sophisticated level of knowledge and training to make judgments about candidates, policies and programmes.时代不同所要求的知识水平也随之提高

Higher education also provides other benefits to society beyond just ensuring an “informed and educated citizenry”. Research has demonstrated that people who attend college are less likely to commit crimes, are less likely to need public assistance, such as government-funded health care, nutritional assistance and unemployment benefits, and enjoy better health. These too are benefits that all society enjoys when individuals invest in post-secondary training and education.
（减少犯罪率等
退一步从另一层面论证高等教育的好处）

Higher education is a very expensive undertaking. Without state subsidy to help lower the price to students and their families, overall investment in colleges and universities would be at suboptimal levels. Without the public subsidy, many students from low- and moderate-income families—even though they have the academic talent necessary to attend college and be successful once there—would be unable to attend, thus leading to inequities in educational opportunity.（个人是否能够支付的起学费的角度来讨论）


Thus, it is not individuals or states that should pay for higher education, but is both who should share in the investment. A failure to structure the funding for colleges and universities in such a manner will lead to underinvestment in human capital, a critical mistake in a time when the link between education and national prosperity has become very apparent.