On my recent
visit to the main campus of the University of Illinois, in
Urbana-Champaign, the presence of Chinese, Korean and Indian students was
marked. The university’s recruiting of the Asian student raises questions that
after 150 years have never been resolved, and seldom even engaged. Which public
is served by a great public university?
At its founding, that public was the
yeoman farmer and the petite bourgeoisie who could not afford to send kids to
private colleges, those being costly, classics-oriented and, with few
exceptions, religious. The public university offered an alternative in the form
of affordable nonsectarian instruction in the useful arts, the better to
prepare the state’s new industrial workforce. The student population was
overwhelmingly Illinoisan; the University of Illinois could have been named the
University for Illinois.
The new U of I offends our chauvinists, but not our economists. For a time, the Chinese
and Indians who trained here tended to stay here, because our economy was
advanced enough to offer them opportunities to put into practice what they had
learned that they didn’t have at home. That is less and less true. Lots of
those students now return to a maturing and prosperous China and Korea and (to a
lesser extent) India.
But then, our best Illinois kids are doing the same
thing. We are exporting trained talent, and just as a lot of California water goes east with every cantaloupe exported to Illinois, so do lots of tax dollars get shipped out of state when college graduates emigrate.
Solutions have been proposed, some of which I explored in “Positive spillovers” in 2013 and “Pay as you leave” in 2015. But if you want Illinois college money to stay in Illinois, make Illinois a
state in which well-educated young people feel they have a future.
This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2017.
