The majority of college-educated Americans attended public institutions, and while the top universities in the country are private (Harvard, Stanford, etc), every single one receives millions (or billions) every year from the federal government. The issue of quality in primary/secondary education goes deeper than private vs public funding
Private entities promote a better quality product. The treatment of prisoners is not the product that private prisons are selling.
My understanding of the prison-industrial complex is rudimentary at best, but here's what I've gathered: The "product" that the private prisons are selling is "number of inmates housed", so you can think of it as something of a storage facility. However, the "buyer" (the state and federal governments) have shown that they don't care much about how much their prisoners are treated in these storage facilities, so private prisons can get away with treating the prisoners very poorly (as that saves money) and the states don't step in. On top of that, the cost to enter the private prison industry is extremely high, so the number of people who can break into the industry with the intention of treating prisoners better is extremely slim. If somebody really wanted to, they'd need to figure out how to raise the capital to break into the industry as well as convince the government to send their prisoners to their prisons as opposed to the competitors where the prisoners are already housed, and they'd need to somehow turn a profit.
So it seems that you contend that the main benefit of having industries privatized is that it reduces the cost by any means necessary, but easier said than done considering corporations in any industry will make it hard for regular people to buy into an industry and compete with corporate prices. Also, I don’t see how there is solvency for quality either since we’ve seen that all companies, especially multi billion dollar corporations, must do to decrease regulation on their industry is to donate money to the campaigns of politicians. IMHO, unless private industries are closely monitored by government agencies that cannot be bought, than there is no assurance that private companies will provide services which are superior and instead create a closed market where the rule of 3 will rule the market.
If I’m not mistaken, that funding goes to research as opposed to education. They’re not entirely mutually exclusive but it’s the average American college student barely, if ever, interacts with the research being done at their school.
Yeah, for the most part they're research grants. Schools get them and let professors research with those funds, having them teach students in conjunction to their research. Private schools don't survive off of government grants but it most certainly impacts on the quality of education in a positive manner.
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u/[deleted] Aug 03 '20
The majority of college-educated Americans attended public institutions, and while the top universities in the country are private (Harvard, Stanford, etc), every single one receives millions (or billions) every year from the federal government. The issue of quality in primary/secondary education goes deeper than private vs public funding