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A Case Against Curtailing Public Subsidises in Higher Education -Nivedita Sarkar and Anuneeta Mitra

-Vikalp

The contribution of education in economic development has been investigated since the early 1960s, originating in the University of Chicago (Schultz, 1961; Becker, 1964), championed by the Human Capital School - in which expenditure on education is regarded as an investment. It was argued through the endogenous growth theory (Lucas, 1988; Romer, 1990) that spending in education is crucial for increasing labour productivity and accelerating the pace of economic growth. Over the last three decades it has also been proven beyond doubt through numerous empirical researches that individual earnings are positively associated with years of schooling along with the fact that education confers a gamut of positive externalities to the society. Therefore, the much discussed possibility of market failure associated with positive externality brings forth the rationale for public intervention in education. However, public spending in the form of subsidies, on higher education is often argued to be highly inequitable - advocating a drastic cut in subsidies (Psacharopoulos, 1994; World Bank, 1994). This view has gained currency of late and draws attention to the skewed distribution of public subsidies in higher education, with its incidence shown to be distinctly pro-rich. Therefore, spending meagre government resources to finance the higher education of the rich is considered to be a colossal inefficient use of public money. Thus, it is often strongly suggested that scarce government resources should be redirected in favour of basic/primary education. In this article we attempt to scrutinize whether curtailing public spending in higher education would help in achieving the principle of equity? To do this we first investigate how much the government spends on higher education anyway.

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