John Cochrane: belief

Transcript context

…No, it is voluntary. Voluntary rules, but you set them. People can secede if they don’t like it. You can make a tenure clock. Ten years everywhere. You could make it two years. You could abolish tenure. A lot of different things you could do. I’d have to obey some much harder rules here, that I’m not allowed to put myself in charge. We have to somehow obey competition. There’s a remarkable lack of competition among universities. Let’s get rid of the entire legal structure of the nonprofit organization to start with. I think that’ll lead to getting rid of tenure. Tenure is useful for one thing. It forces people to make a decision. Tenure is not about the permanent employment. It’s about, when do you get to have a vote on who else gets to be in this place? It forces people to sit down and read the damn papers and say, “Should we keep Tyler on or not?” That’s kind of a useful thing, but you can have those without tenure. I have to go back to my libertarian instincts and say what we need is a healthy dose of competition in this business and — But why is for-profit education done so poorly? We’ve had a lot of it. We’ve had it in other countries like the Philippines. Turkey in earlier decades, had a lot of for-profits. They seem to disappear largely for market-based reasons.…

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