A Conservative's Argument for Higher Education

Legislators have at this point probably heard many student perspectives about the cuts to the UC budget, and liberal reasons to fund the UCs such as "access" have made a strong showing. A question that is thus far mostly unaddressed is that of the conservative position on higher education. Both for the sake of diversity of ideas and to catch the attention of statesmen who (like me) are unmoved by liberal arguments, I discuss here the reasons why a principled conservative vision for CA
ultimately should include appreciable investment in higher education.

The first thing to understand is that what is called conservative today by statist liberals was, at its inception, called classical liberalism, and this emerged when the Western world was emerging from feudalism to industrialization and globalization. In the Western world from 1850-1880, "captains of industry" realized they needed copious numbers of at least modestly-educated employees-literate, knowledgeable of
mathematical basics, etc. As you know, even Karl Marx, the great detractor of the bourgeoisie, credited the captains of industry with creating more wealth and gainful employment than the world had ever seen before. It was the bourgeoisie who asked their national leaders to create a public education system for the masses. In parallel, civil engineering arguably became the first public university major, as the
industrial revolution had created unprecedented infrastructure needs. The state was brought into the education business for the simple reasons of collectivized investment and risk-sharing. Every company must train its employees to some degree, but the alternative to public education would be for companies to internalize the full training track of their accountants. This would essentially involve hiring six-year-olds and schooling them for ~6 years before they were ever productive-not a
tenable strategy given the great variability there would be in training success. Bourgeoisie invention of public education is in no way liberal; one of the first companies that needed a global network of educated people was the British East India Tea Company-a colonial entity and the epitome of what liberals would find offensive.

Let us fast-forward to today. As someone fortunate enough to have grown up in Palo Alto, I am acquainted with numerous entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and now I study in Irvine, so the people in my surroundings haven't changed that much. Some things never change: these people, like the captains of industry of a century ago, have great faith in the free market and are strong believers in limited government. Among this crowd, the most popular political philosopher is Ayn Rand; incidentally, her ubermenschian outlook fits into the mould of Nietzsche's, which came about right about when the bourgeoisie (and state partners) of the era were clearly the first folks in human history with the potential to truly make the world in their image. But by and large, these people are not anarchists; the obvious question is "if they envision such a limited government but still envision its existence, what few things do they envision it doing?"

Answering this requires positing another question. Who and what creates wealth in California? Why are there robust upper-middle-class taxpayer bases in Silicon Valley, Orange County, and elsewhere? Many of these high-paying jobs are provided by businesses in computation, information technology, green tech, biotech, and medical devices, and these are major sources of wealth creation for the state as a whole. In addition to "money" wealth, their products also greatly enhance our standard of
living. As Norman Augustine pointed out in the "gathering storm" report, more than 50% of recent economic and societal progress can be attributed to technoindustry. The firms in these important industries are often started or funded by the above-mentioned captains of industry, California's job creators, whose views are accurately represented by the Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network.

At a basic level, their companies of course need higher education to train programmers, engineers, and lab technicians. But before a company becomes big and employs many, they must have a concept, a nascent idea. This is where the role of postgraduate education shines. The ideas birthing many startups and small firms, such as California Stem Cell, Shrink Nanotechnologies, and Palantir, were born in the UC system. The venture capitalist class in part relies on universities to create their investment opportunities. While not every grad student will have an idea
worthy of starting a company around, the grad students that do start companies need highly skilled labor. There are revolutions under way in computing, for example, with both light-based and quantum computing being hot areas of development. When these ideas become the next Google or HP, they will employ people with bachelor's degrees, but right now, these labors need physics and CS PhDs. Biotech firms, meanwhile, want people with PhD training to fulfill the bioinformatics and systems biology needs of their research and development workflows; most UC PhD students in
these areas successfully seek industry positions upon degree conferral. In short, the motivations of the job creator classes from 1870 generalize to 2010: they want a strong K-PhD pipeline because without it, their ventures simply cannot run. Because of the current sorry state of the high end of this pipeline, for owners of startups on the technological cutting edge, free-market assumptions about labor allocation are flatly violated: if their company creates a need for five PhDs of some type, those slots (and thus the beginning of the intended work) may take months
to fill!

National security also motivates principled conservative support for public higher education. The looming conflict with Russia formed the backdrop to founding the NSF in 1947, the conservation PDEs currently taught to graduate students across many fields were invented in the '50s by NSF-funded researchers; the intention being to get nuke-tipped missiles from fields in Kansas to the red square! The internet and GPS both got their start and the majority of their early development as military projects. Ike, Kennedy, and Nixon all took steps to increase STEM education funding-in the name of America's cold war needs. On a national note that nonetheless has ideological bearing on decisions we make in CA, the scientific and defense communities are horrified at the current GOP inconsistency between desires for military prowess and higher education funding policy.

In short, if California were to invest an arbitrarily large amount in public higher education, the point of diminishing returns would eventually be reached. But we are not even close to that point with our current spending, and the startups born out of so many UC campuses and their hungry seeking of the best-trained graduates are a demonstration that the Golden State is getting an appreciable return on its higher
education investment! Because of the return produced, there was ultimately no justification, not even a "budget crisis", to slash this investment in the state's future. Some of you may say that the funding will be restored as soon as the economy recovers and tax revenues increase-but without this investment, that recovery will never happen.

Dear Senator Harman,

My name is Angela Hawk and I am writing to urge you to reinvest in the University of California and higher education.

A native of Stockton, I began my University of California education at UC Davis in the year 2000. I was the first person in both my immediate and extended family to attend college and I was extremely proud to embark on my career in higher education in the public university system of my home state.

Today, I am one year away from receiving my Ph.D. in History from UC Irvine. Although I am as proud today as I was nearly 10 years ago of my association with the University of California, I am also deeply troubled. The legislature’s approval of severe budget cuts for the University of California system signals a divestment in higher public education that is not only in direct contravention to the state’s Master Plan, but will also lead to long-term, irreparable damage to the social and economic health of California.

During my nearly decade-long association with the University of California, I have experienced the full spectrum of opportunities our top-tier educational system has to offer. As an undergraduate, I worked as a student assistant in a lab performing cutting-edge research in evolutionary biology, studied Arthurian literature at the University of Cambridge through the Education Abroad Program, and sang with the UC Davis Chorus at the opening ceremonies of state-of-the-art Mondavi Performing Arts Center. As a full-time staff member at Davis in my interim year between undergraduate and graduate school, I received superior retirement benefits, a generous employment package, and numerous opportunities for professional enrichment, notably skill-enhancement classes and seminars. Finally, as a graduate student, I have had the privilege of honing my teaching skills as both a teaching assistant and instructor while simultaneously receiving strong university support for my own research. Most recently, I was the recipient of a year-long UC Pacific Rim Research Program grant that supported my travel to Australia and Canada to complete archival research on my dissertation.

Because I have benefited so profoundly from my University of California experience, my desire has always been to remain in California after I have completed my Ph.D. and to reinvest my education into the same system that made it possible. Unfortunately, if current trends continue, it will be economically unviable for me to pursue my teaching and research goals at a California community college, state school, or UC campus. In all likelihood, another state will receive the fruits of California’s decade-long investment in my education.

Although the particulars of my story are unique, hundreds of thousands of individuals will experience the repercussions of the state’s eroding support for higher public education. These individuals will not only face a decline in the quality of public education, but will also, in many cases, have to forfeit their opportunity for a UC education altogether. This situation is untenable.

While I appreciate the challenges we face as a state and the difficult budgetary decisions before the legislature, I firmly believe that slashing UC funding and moving toward a privatized system would be a disastrous move in both the short and long term. Please consider all possible alternatives to cutting funding to public education, including addressing and surmounting the flaws in the state’s tax structure. Now is not the time for half-measures. Please reinvest in the University of California system.

Sincerely,
Angela Hawk

University of California, Irvine

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