I offer options we might reflect upon, although I care less about which we choose than that we make a deliberate choice.

In many countries – including here for K-12 – public education means free education. (Private Rice University was also free for years.)

Our state universities’ tuition exceeds what students paid at private colleges not that many years ago. Without articulating it, let alone choosing, we have gradually substituted expensive private higher education for free public education. We have not had the rational analysis or public discussion to support this radical change.

The bumper sticker says it all: “If you think education is expensive just wait until you start paying for ignorance.”

Are we willing to raise state income taxes? Our representatives’ silence suggests they think we’re not. Is that our answer? If so, options are limited. Even if we are willing to pay, there's more to education than college.

President George W. Bush said he wants educational programs that “leave no child behind.” But the child with fetal-alcohol syndrome is left behind at birth. So are hungry, homeless children in desperate poverty who’ve never seen a book.

Perhaps the highest return for our educational tax dollars is to redirect as many of them as possible to child-centered programs from mothers' prenatal care through children's kindergarten. That, plus smaller elementary classes, might well produce eighth graders more skilled and informed – on average – than many of our high school graduates today.

In a global, high-tech information age, the need for higher education is obvious. But in a nation with wide-ranging mobility, providing that education with state rather than national tax dollars is not so obvious.

Even with higher out-of-state tuition, why should the citizens of Iowa pay any of the cost of educating Iowans, let alone others, who leave the state after graduation and never return?

Why not have the nation’s taxpayers pay the costs of providing education to the nation’s college students – wherever they chose to attend school and later live? The GI Bill provided such a program after WWII to the great cultural and economic benefit of us all.

Over the last century or so, we’ve expanded free public education from K-8  to K-12. Maybe it's time to expand to K-16. Many states and nations have done so.

If that’s too big and expensive a leap, how about K-14?

If we'd redirect enough funds to the state’s community colleges, they could provide our high school graduates with two additional, free years. It would be a cheaper way of providing the first two years of college, and a way of using an ever-increasing pool of well-educated, skilled workers to attract new business.

An opposite approach would be to put the full college cost on the primary beneficiaries: college students. Whether non-profit public, or unabashedly private, we could raise college tuition to cover education’s full costs. Students could borrow the money and pay it back from the increased earnings a college education creates.

To give graduates a range of job choice – including low-paying, public interest jobs – their payback into a revolving fund could be administered by the IRS and calculated as a percentage of their 1040 form “adjusted gross income.” The more remunerative the college education the greater the payback.

These are just some of our choices. There are more.

Iowa has no shortage of informed educational administrators and others with ideas to offer. Any choice, if well considered, would be preferable to refusing to consider our options.

Otherwise, apathy, avoidance, special-interest pleading, drift and political cowardice will continue to drive us by default toward today’s unintended consequences.
_______________

Nicholas Johnson is a former school board member who teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law.