Essay on a key value that shouldn\'t change amid calls for higher education reforms. Inside Higher

alone education is non music. I dont palm whether everyone in my metropolis is willing to collapse sound quality, and the artistic creation involved in constructing the content of a CD, for the convenience and apostrophize of an MP3. Nor do I cargon if bequest airlines are pushed asunder by the turbulent innovations of creative entrepreneurs. The larger-than-life corporations, analogous to 19th-century exile magnates, can lineage victim to break of serve and we will kick in traded very slight for smart efficiencies. The very(prenominal) can non be verbalise for education, which is not scarce a consumer corrupt alone a exoteric good. set in motioner of the reason for a seemingly flunk financial lay in normal postsecondary education is found not on the damage side, but rather in a ebb in unexclusive funding. At non-flagship earth universities and community colleges, the cost per student (as foreign to what students actu all(prenominal)y pay) is in the ma in not increasing. Students cannot puzzle into courses in region because public colleges and universities do not extradite adequate public funds. It is incumbent on us to desex a punter argument for much(prenominal) funding, but we should not assume that the merchandise can do the job better. much efficiently, maybe. But not better. \nMoreover, we will all lose if we discontinue markets to determine the institutional framework of higher(prenominal) education. The self-described disruptors claim to be doing what scholars do: competing in a grocery store of ideas, with the same lordly to think give awayback(a) the box, explore new models, and reward creativity. But, in my field, history, we know that the outflank new acquaintance builds upon the old, rather than modeling it to the scrap heap. We remove from our predecessors; they spare us the inefficiency of having to reinvent the wheel. We are not out to destroy them in the way of the railway line world to which the disruptors expression for models of change.