Bjart, I am slowly moving into the academia world (or being dragged into it). Here's what I have seen so far.
Small groups of people who want to change academia to better support students.
Administrators afraid of change, because change may distort their "vision" of the university.
Small groups going it alone, starting covert programs and failing due to the sheer power of the administration.
If you have never experienced this in academia, then you have been in a very unusual and wonderful university or you are just clueless to what happens. I doubt both in either case....so what's the third option?
OK, here are two books to start with.I'm not even going to respond to the rest as it's all wishful thinking without the right data to back it up.
Irwin "Free Trade Under Fire"
Friedman "The World Is Flat"
Both use ample empirical data and observation to show how free market economies consistently are more productive, are fairer, and tend to weed out corruption and inefficient programs quickly.
We can get into how "communism looks great on paper", but you can ever get past the point of corruption in a system. How many times in your role have you done a favor for someone or yourself (call a friend for help, use your role to get something in a different method than what is normal for everyone else). This is how corruption begins, as people start working outside of the system, creating backdoors to processes (and then the temptation for money becomes too great). Once people can find ways around the system, they start using them until they are shut down.
In free market economies, those processes are called innovative competitors. If you can find a company which can deliver a good or services in a cheaper/faster/better way, people will come to you for it and leave existing processes behind.
The end of "use it or lose it" budgets will only come when services are put into a competitive marketplace. This can be accomplished in all three fields which I listed earlier.
Schools. Public Schools have three years to pull it together. Within three years, all public funding ends and school vouchers are created. Vouchers are created at a specific funding level. Voucher values will start at a level equivalent to the per student charge at the beginning of the program. Schools set tuition rates, and parents can decide if they want to go to a cheaper school (which results in a refund to the parents) or a more expensive school (which may cost the parents more). This will create competition within the school system.
There's more, but it's a nice Saturday afternoon and I'm a bit wiped from end of term.
