The necessary luxury?

This is a rambling post I started last year, rambling that reflects the general confusion today about how to explain the value of education and formal schooling. For the record, my answer to the question at the end is yes, but I'm trying to sort out some of the issues here rather than argue for my answer. In the fall, Kirstin Wilcox and Russell Berman grumbled about how outsiders are defending foreign-language disciplines in colleges and universities, a gambit that strikes me as similar to complaining about the firefighters who come to your house. (Or, for those who know the joke, "He had a hat!") But questions about how to justify the study of humanities (whether you try the incompetent route of Stanley Fish [even apart from his admittedly-ignorant blathering on college costs] or the smarter route of Christopher Newfield) are just the tip of the iceberg. Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz wrote a very smart book a few years ago with the ultimate human-capital-as-equalizer argument in favor of schooling: the growth in educational attainment in the U.S. over the past few decades has failed to keep up with technological change, and we need to accelerate educational achievement/attainment.

I've been mulling over the book for months, and in the meantime David Labaree has pointed out in his new book that among its weaknesses Goldin and Katz use the classic marketing of a mutual-fund prospectus: no matter how high is the boldface type saying "past performance is no guarantee of future results," everything is geared towards the assumption that if they're right about the past century, you should also buy the authors' prescription for future education policy. And both Labaree and Michael Katz ($$sub required) point out that the proportion of the last century's economic growth Goldin and Katz attribute to formal schooling is below 20%–not exactly an overwhelming argument for the dominance of human capital. 

So what's an educator to do?

Ironically enough, it's easier to make the fiscal case for many humanities than for the sciences or vocational education: at least at the K-12 level, teaching a choir or an art history class is going to be less expensive than a properly-equipped lab or almost any vocational-ed classroom, and the internet provides gorgeous images of all sorts of art. (And if you can't afford a set of plastic recorders for elementary-school music, try a drinking-straw oboe–science along with the [noise] music!) But this isn't really about the cost of individual classes so much as the cost of formal schooling in general and how to think about its value.

I think Corey Bunje Bower had an interesting point in 2008 when he argued that from a long-term historical standpoint, extensive formal schooling is a luxury public good generally affordable for wealthier countries. So while school expenditures may have increased dramatically over the past half-century, at first glance it looks like school spending in the U.S. has remained a fairly stable proportion of GDP over the past several decades. 

To a great extent, the history of education in the U.S. has followed a "growing pyramid" pattern where each large swath of schooling has absorbed most of the potential students before the next layer above it has expanded significantly. (For the purposes of this discussion, I'm omitting the messiness of tertiary schooling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, or the dips in secondary enrollment in WW1 and WW2.) The extent to which other countries has followed a similar path? An open question. Some initial forays I made a few years ago using international census data suggest that countries in the second half of the twentieth century followed different paths, some with the "growth pyramid" pattern while others expanded only primary schooling, pushed most at primary and tertiary levels, or had little choice but to disinvest from tertiary education thanks to the IMF in its Evil Eighties phase. These countries are implicitly making choices (or being forced to make choices) about where to invest scarce educational resources. 

In contrast, American education in the 20th century has been about making choices under frequently-generous conditions. That abundance is inconsistent from period to period and from place to place. The Great Depression is the obvious exception on period: it was not an era of great generosity towards public schools, and I suspect that a careful look at public-sector expenditures would see school spending falling as a proportion of public spending for a good part of the 1930s, primarily because federal expenditures in the middle of the decade focused on public works projects, and increased spending in 1939 and following was largely for WW2. In terms of geographic inconsistency, Bruce Baker has been fairly persistent on his blog (such as his December 10 entry) in pointing out interstate variations in recent spending patterns. But in contrast with many other places and times, education spending over the past half-century in the U.S. has been quite generous. It is very important to note that a significant part of that generosity is because of the civil-rights movement in its various aspects in pushing around the democratic state. 

The dilemma from the perspective of those who see education as an investment (as President Obama does) is that from a long-range historical perspective today's level of education spending looks like conspicuous consumption, a luxury. Looking to the future, the president and many others have argued that it is an urgent necessity. Can one have a necessary luxury?