In a new paper published by the Pope Center, author Max Borders questions whether taxpayer support of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) is a wise use of public funds. He concludes that there is little identifiable public benefit from the school and that it ought to be privatized.
Because I am an ardent supporter of the fine arts, the intersection of higher education and the arts is of particular interest to me. I love the arts and want to see them thrive.
Bach. Beethoven. Rossini. Puccini. Shakespeare. Wilde. More, please!
Nevertheless, Borders makes a persuasive case that fine arts education can and should stand on its own, independent of government funding. He dispatches the “public goods” argument for government funding and even calls into question the case for government funding of higher education generally.
Relatively few North Carolinians know that the state has a fine arts school, much less anything about it. UNCSA is located in Winston-Salem and has a student body of 1,161, including 289 who are of high school age (who get to attend free of charge). A startling fact about the school is that on a per student basis, it is the most expensive component of the entire UNC system, with an expenditure of $24,943. The next most costly institution is research-heavy UNC-Chapel Hill ($21,444 per student) followed by NC State ($18,284).
The high cost is explained by the need for uniformly small classes and the expense of providing instruments and equipment. (Whether the school’s high cost might be reduced if it were under private management is a question we’ll return to later.) The entire state budget for UNCSA is about $30 million annually. That’s a small amount in comparison with the whole UNC system, but Borders argues that the school shouldn’t be immune from cost scrutiny just because there are bigger fish that might be fried.
How is it that North Carolina came to have a public arts school? Only two other states have such institutions (New York and Massachusetts), but North Carolina was the path breaker. UNCSA was founded in 1965, the brainchild of former governor Terry Sanford. Sanford thought that the state needed to escape the stereotype of being a “cultural wasteland.” Governor Sanford and his legislative allies easily rolled over opposition to their plan—even in 1965, few members of the General Assembly wanted to be cast as opponents of cultural progress—and got the school up and running.
Their idea was that having a state-supported fine arts conservatory would somehow catalyze an artistic renaissance in the state. But it’s very doubtful that the school had any such effect. It’s one thing to have a school for training musicians, dancers, film-makers, and so on; it’s quite another to have a rising public desire for fine arts performances and exhibitions. In this regard, Borders points to a telling statistic: very few of the graduates of UNCSA are employed in North Carolina.
There is a national labor market for artistic talent, just as there is for other kinds of expertise. Well-trained musicians, dancers and others (and UNCSA unquestionably produces well-trained performers) will go where they can make the best living. Evidently, most find that it isn’t in North Carolina.
And let’s face it: people’s tastes are not affected by the presence of a fine arts school in Winston-Salem. Those who like NASCAR or basketball aren’t going to start going to operas just because some of the singers were trained in the state.
Rather than providing a benefit to the public generally, Borders contends that the school only confers individual benefits on its students, namely the skills they’ll later take into the market. They get a highly subsidized education, with tuition far below what private conservatories charge, but only a small segment of the North Carolina population ever attends a performance. And the ticket price they pay will be the same whether the performers are UNCSA grads or not. Those who like the fine arts are no better off here than in states that don’t have anything comparable to UNCSA.
In short, it’s easy to make the airy assertion that “the public” benefits from the UNCSA, but if you think about it carefully, the only clear beneficiaries are the students who get a big discount on the cost of their training.
Overwhelmingly, the education of artists and performers in the United States is not accomplished through government institutions. Nearly all music conservatories and arts schools are privately run and financed. Therefore, shouldn’t state taxpayers be relieved of the expense of UNCSA by privatizing it? Borders maintains that they should be. Ideally, the school would be sold to some group with an interest in fine arts education. That would not only save tax money for true government functions (or tax relief), but it would probably also lead to greater efficiency and innovation, Borders shows.
Until such time as the school can be fully privatized, the low tuition rates should be increased to levels commensurate with private schools.
If the taxpayers shouldn’t be required to subsidize the education of ballerinas and flutists, why should they subsidize the education of lawyers, accountants, or engineers either? Borders notes that his paper leads to a more fundamental question about the role of government in higher education. Although he declines to pursue that inquiry beyond the UNCSA, he adverts to some points worth considering.
For one thing, the low tuition at UNCSA probably lures in some students who would be better off pursuing another career path, since many jobs in the arts field pay poorly. The same point can be made about the UNC system generally. Because students don’t have to bear the full cost of attendance, many enroll and spend years and substantial amounts of money to get degrees that will have little value in a job market overflowing with college graduates.
Another point Borders makes is that some other states, most notably Virginia and Michigan, are moving away from state funding and control of their university systems. That is a model for privatizing UNCSA, but it’s also a model that could be applied to the UNC system in total.
But one thing at a time. UNCSA could be privatized and with the state’s budget deep in red ink, this is a great time to start.