maxiep
RIP Dr. Jack
- Joined
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Quite frankly, the state can't afford not do it. Skilled workforce is required to attract businesses that provide employment and tax-income. One of the things holding the metro Portland area down is the lack of high-quality higher education.
The best educated cities have some of the shittiest public universities around.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/16/the-most-educated-cities_n_649305.html#s115253
Look at the public universities in these areas. The top three have schools that suck. Of the top ten, only #4, #7 and #8 can make the case that people stuck around because of the education.
As for Portland, give me a break. It's not held back by poor public universities, it's held back because of its unfriendly business climate.
This has nothing to do with being able to compete - it has anything to do with promoting better education for a more skilled workforce and population.
It's an inefficient way to go about it.
This is a rather short-sighted look at it. The people that live near Stanford and UCLA have seen their property values sky-rocket because of all the businesses that were created because of research and education from these institutes, and the same is right for most areas where the better schools are at. (and btw, I am aware that Stanford is not a public school). The same is true for Boston and MIT and Zurich and the university of Zurich and Haifa and the Technion and just about every place where good schools are around the world.
Once again, you've found a really inefficient way to raise housing values. BTW, you just made the argument that private schools can do the job better than a public one. Your international examples were silly, because those countries finance their university system differently from the US. I'm glad you came around, though.
There are a lot of benefits to helping educate the population - they are not necessarily direct and easy to tabulate - but they are better than the alternative.
The alternative is that we keep our money and put the burden on paying for educating people on themselves instead of the forced panhandling that goes on now. Why is paying for things directly worse than asking for others to subsidize you?
