In this week’s Campus Review, John Quiggin in polemical mode takes aim at for-profit higher education. He claims ‘for profit education has been a consistent failure in all times and places’ , with some ‘limited exceptions’ in vocational training.

Curiously, he provides very little evidence of the failure of for-profit higher education. He reports some of the legal troubles of the University of Phoenix, but it has 250,000 students and has operated successfully for many years, as have various competitors in the US market. The legal troubles relate to violations of student admissions and loans regulations, not the quality of their courses. The statistic he cites on their graduation rate refers to a market they barely target, full-time and first-time college attendees (as here, US completion statistics are of poor quality).

Apart from the Singapore-based but partly Australian owned U21 Global he doesn’t even mention any of the Australian for-profits, though there quite a few of them, with nearly 30 signed up for FEE-HELP (some with common owners). The players in the for-profit market include the stockmarket listed and profitable Navitas, the Australian College of Natural Medicine, and the various providers owned by Amadeus Education.

But there is an interesting issue here: why is for-profit higher education relatively rare? Even in the US, the for-profits have only about 1 million students out of a total enrolment of 17.5 million. (In 2006, about 20 Australia for-profits reported 5,094 students to DEST, but they were only obliged to report students receiving FEE-HELP.)

Professor Q’s answer is:

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It’s not yet mentioned on their website, but an e-mail over the weekend announced that libertarian bookseller Laissez Faire Books is closing down. As they explain it:

The book market has changed tremendously over the past 30+ years, and it has gotten harder and harder for a small niche bookseller to cover expenses. I suppose the market has spoken.

And those who advocate the market must accept its verdict. But I am sorry to see Laissez Faire books go. In my twenties (and maybe earlier, I can’t remember now) I was an enthusiastic Laissez Faire customer. I wasn’t ideologically (or perhaps nearly as importantly, temperamentally) inclined to sign up to all their enthusiasms, especially for Ayn Rand, but better Friedman, Hayek, Sowell et al. than the swooning over the state of much of the Australian intelligentsia.

Though I am sorry to see Laissez Faire close, I am one of the reasons they are going. Even when a Laissez Faire email alerted me to a new book I wanted, I would usually end up buying it from Amazon. Once, Laissez Faire was the only place I could locate many libertarian books, but Amazon caters to just about every niche market. After taking into account the cheaper postage when buying several books at once, Amazon was usually the less expensive option too.

So Laissez Faire have been caught up in the creative destruction of their ideology. Amazon does a great job of making libertarian books accessible, but it is has helped wipe out a specialist libertarian bookseller in the process.

This morning’s Higher Education Supplement in The Australian gave the lead story to various interest groups complaining about the Budget decision to reduce Commonwealth subsidies to commerce students by about $1,000, with universities being allowed to increase student contribution amounts by about $1,200.

“It is hard for us to see how this is going to attract more people into doing those courses. In fact, it might turn them away.”

… said Geoff Rankin, chief executive of CPA Australia, which represents 112,000 finance, accounting and business professionals. …

It is a great worry to us,” University of Western Sydney vice-chancellor Janice Reid said.

“It will be a significant disincentive for students who might have seen a bachelor of business or bachelor of commerce as a viable alternative to a bachelor of arts or a general degree in the humanities.

As usual, these arguments assume that prices have a big impact on which courses students choose. Yet a study (pdf) released a couple of years ago put the average income premium from a business undergraduate degree, compared to a Year 12 qualification, at $542,000. The maximum extra cost that could be imposed on a student would be 0.66% of that. Prospective business students who can’t work out that the course is still a good deal have no aptitude for financial reasoning and - as Janice Reid suggests - should perhaps do Arts instead.
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The Peel is a Melbourne gay bar that, according to its owner Tom McFeely, isn’t gay enough. He applied for an exemption to the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act, legislation that would otherwise forbid him from keeping out women and straight men. And yesterday in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal he was granted that exemption.

According to The Age, the decision was not met with universal support:

WHEN Collingwood hotelier Tom McFeely decided to fight for the right to refuse entry to heterosexuals, he braced himself for a backlash. And a barrage of angry talkback callers proved him right yesterday.

But should McFeely even have had to apply for such an exemption? Anti-discrimination law is an issue that has divided liberals. There is a version of liberalism which holds that the way the state should treat its citizens - as impartially as possible - is a model for all institutions in civil society as well. Liberal states create space for people to live according to their own assessment of what makes for a good life, whether or not other people approve of it. But in a liberal society, the state may be the most powerful single institution, but private power has a large impact as well. To create space for the liberal individual, private as well as public power needs to be regulated. In alliance with egalitarian philosophies, this liberal idea helps explain why we have legislation prohibiting discrimination based on a wide variety of attributes.

Another version of liberalism holds that anti-discrimination law undermines freedom of association, the right to choose who we associate with and on what terms. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, the ACCC action Sinclair Davidson and Tim Wilson are taking against Fairtrade coffee sparked the lengthiest-ever debate at this blog. But how many people might be interested in getting some social justice with their coffee?

The ABS General Social Survey 2006, the first results from which were released this week, provides some answers. It found that, over the last twelve months, a quarter of those surveyed had ‘boycotted or deliberately bought products for political, ethical or environmental reasons’. The fashion-prone young were not the most likely to buy or not buy for these reasons; on all measures of activism including this one they were below average. It was the middle-aged 45-54 year olds who were the most socially aware consumers, with 30% taking political, ethical or environmental considerations into account.

The 2005 Australia Survey of Social Attitudes asked a very similar question, except that their time period was 2 years rather than 12 months. Doubling the time period also doubled the proportion taking these factors into account, suggesting that for some consumers political purchasing is a very occasional event, rather than an everyday one like coffee (or perhaps the Fairtrade coffee is so bad that once is enough).
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According to The Weekend Australian, regular commenter Sinclair Davidson and Tim Wilson of the Institute of Public Affairs are going to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, alleging that Oxfam has engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct over its Fairtrade coffee. According to Oxfam:

The term Fairtrade refers to an independently audited product certification and labelling system that ensures those who grow and produce coffee get a fair go. It does this by:

Paying farmers and workers a fair price for their work
Helping them gain skills and knowledge to develop their businesses in the global economy
Providing a certification and labelling system to ensure Fairtrade standards are met and that the benefits of Fairtrade get back to the farmer who produced the product

But according to Tim, drawing in part on this Cato article:

there was evidence that Fairtrade products could do more harm than good for coffee producers in undeveloped nations. He cited reports alleging producers had been charged thousands of dollars to become certified Fairtrade providers and some labourers received as little as $3 a day.

I know nothing about how much Fairtrade affects coffee producers, but if we were to be a little cynical about Fairtrade consumers it perhaps doesn’t matter much whether it is good for producers or not. As I have long argued (eg here and here) there is a market for political gestures, and how effective the gesture is likely to be doesn’t seem to be a huge part of the calculation.
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