Neoliberals justified full-cost student tuition as a defense of intellectual diversity

Evidence

In what seemed at first glance to be a narrowly “economic” contribution, Benjamin Rogge delivered a paper on the financing of higher education. Rogge argued that the appropriate way to respect the pro-market creed in the organization of colleges and universities would be to finance all their operations out of student tuition fees. Rogge decried the subsidization of student education on the grounds that it served as an unnecessary and unwarranted intervention into the education market. He found it especially objectionable that people routinely denied the principle of consumers’ sovereignty in this market on the grounds that those seeking education were uneducated. Contrariwise, he held that having students pay the full cost of education would force professors to more faithfully attend to the instruction of their students. To subsidize students’ education, colleges and universities placed themselves in the position of needing funds from the government, alumni, the wealthy, and corporations. But relying on these groups for funding gave them undue sway over the curriculum, stifling intellectual diversity. Rogge noted, “he who pays the piper will call the tune.” He did not begrudge funders for seeking to “call the tune,” but he sought to diffuse such power among many more, and diverse rather than organized, tune-callers (the students themselves). A full-cost pricing method would achieve this because the consumers of education—the students—were, in his view, many and diverse. Consequently, full-cost pricing would also supposedly promote intellectual diversity. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 103

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to how contemporary higher-ed austerity rhetoric reframes cost-shifting onto students as anti-collectivist intellectual pluralism.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the ‘consumers sovereignty’ principle as applied to education within early MPS debates, including the counterargument to treating students as uneducated consumers.
• XREF: connects to: Student tuition fees were proposed as a pro-market formula for achieving intellectual diversity — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 103

Broader Connections

• Student tuition fees were proposed as a pro-market formula for achieving intellectual diversity #corroborates (0.95) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 103