Perceptions of public and private goods

A provocative post by Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson in the Chronicle of Higher Education asks whether higher education is a public or private good.  As one might expect, Baum and McPherson find that it has attributes of both types of goods, and therefore should receive some public subsidy along with expecting students (and their families) to shoulder a portion of the cost.

While it is pretty easy to describe in economic, social and humanistic terms the public benefit that accrues even from private universities, it is far harder to make the same point for private elementary and secondary schools.  Yet, it seems unlikely that all the benefits of private education are private.  If nothing else, a case can be made that communities are enriched by having educational options, and that private, independent schools educate a disproportionate share of future leaders, etc.  Still, these seem rather milquetoast in comparison, say, to the public good that accrues in Boston from Harvard University or in Los Angeles from the University of Southern California.

Maybe this is the reason many independent schools struggle with generating philanthropic interest: we simply have not done a good enough job describing the public benefit side of what we do.  The private gains are immediately evident, but if serious donors cannot quickly grasp that we make the world a better place, too, then no wonder their gifts are lackluster.