Now this is a shocker.

Watching tonight's replay of PBS's Frontline on the last 20 years of global warming politics one thing stood out (you will recall my previous attack on a local PBS show, but Frontline is a well-produced national show that at least asks hard questions, often to both sides).

President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore both refused to be interviewed on their own actions and inactions during the 1990s in dealing with global warming!

What's going on there? Can Al Gore only handle a platform that he controls, where no hard questions are asked.

Let me repeat that.

Frontline is reporting that President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore both refused to be interviewed on their own actions and inactions during the 1990s in dealing with global warming!

In an epiphany, ZR has yet another early morning idea, and is creating a new category called ZR solutions. In the previous entry, I opined on the possibility of "progressively curved" government-employee pay cuts. It's an idea that could appeal to conservatives and liberals for different reasons.

In reading this Detroit News piece by Marisa Schultz (this is not the first time ZR has noticed solid work from Schultz), several ideas combined into one in my mind.

The article notes that 75% of Michigan's young teachers end up being employed out-of-state, because our own child-aged population is declining and more notably because universities are pumping out even greater numbers of teachers. I'd add that the educational lobby, university administrators, and others also "over-sold" the "teacher shortage" in the late 90s, and have gained this knowledge through first-hand conversations with many teachers and teacher-certificate holders that are stuck in Michigan without jobs. And perhaps there is still a teacher-shortage in growth-states, which means that newly trained teachers that aren't tied to Michigan leave by a margin of 3-1. Since the average legislative "subsidy" of higher education is $5800 a year, we are literally subsidizing schools to train out-of-state jobs - at a very significant clip. And Michigan universities do not appear "responsive" to that concern, since it is the path of least resistance is to take the state's money which it will get no matter what and continue to use the "capacity" now developed for teacher training.

One answer that appears to have cross-partisan appeal is to end the Constitutional autonomy of universities, or curtail it enough to allow the legislature to control the curriculum direction more. The problem with this approach is that the general concept of autonomy was a good one (within the confines of the interaction between university and legislature - the idea that universities are above the law or the people, which is a gross stretch that universities would like to imagine, is complete bunk) - it keeps Lansing bureaucrats from micro-managing university bureaucrats, and replacing one bureaucrat with another is not a better way.

At another extreme, the education lobby and Governor insist that we must college educate and fully-fund every student, and colleges then complain about an inability (or unwillingness) to steer (or at least offer solid, but expensive, career counseling) students to the fields that will make us competitive - science and technology. Schultz identifies this problem here:

At Western Michigan University, students who are undecided about their major have access to plenty of information on the job market and hot fields, said spokeswoman Cheryl Roland.

"Most students come to us with a career in mind and they are attracted to WMU by the quality of program in the major they plan to pursue," Roland said. "We can't slot students into being engineers or scientists when they aren't interested or academically prepared for that direction."

Part of it is K-12 isn't preparing enough science students - and part of it is students may not be "interested." As one commentator noted, his vision of universities was to:

Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future Inc., another Ann Arbor think tank, said the ultimate question is: What's the purpose of public funding for higher education?

"To fill Michigan jobs or to help kids who grow up in Michigan realize their dreams, no matter where they find work? They are both worthwhile goals. Historically, the answer has been the latter," he said.

If government's role is to subsidize and help everyone "realize their dreams," taxpayers are doomed and the economy will eventually collapse under that weight. The mission of education at most should be prepare everyone to be competent in the knowledge-economy - individuals' must still remain in charge of their own dreams.

So as long as Granholm keeps pumping unaccountable billion-dollar chunks of cash into colleges, we're going to see science stagnation at the expense of growth in softer-fields (though the scientists we do produce are quality and significant in number, we are not optimizing):

About 45 percent of the bachelor's degrees conferred at Michigan's 15 public colleges in 2005 were in science, business, computers and math-related fields.

But over the past six years, the number of graduates has grown considerably in fields such as teaching (up 23 percent), communications and journalism (up 51 percent) and visual and performing arts (up 41 percent).

In essence, from teacher training, to focus on the most productivity-enhancing fields, to the generally exorbitant quadruple-inflation growth in higher education administration spending (mostly salaries), there is no market force acting on the university.

For several years, ZR has advocated, along with other major policy voices, for a program of portability in higher-education funding, very much like the K-12 "foundation grant" of money "per pupil" that travels with the student. Simple calculations suggest that with the administrative savings - not including savings caused by possible competition - all the money handed directly to university administrators could instead be turned over to students (or made portable with them at their choice of Michigan public university) and guarantee everyone about $6300 a year in costs.

That's $2000 more PER YEAR than Granholm's one-time $4000 per student grant.

That's a free-ride or close to it at all be but the most elite Michigan universities - although its not even close to enough to cover a U-Michigan education, and well short of the next three top-flight universities.

But here's the twist to the educational portability proposal - why lock ourselves into total uniformity, and why not incent more pursuit of science, math, and technical training (even non-university training, although that's educational heresy). And if a field is still oversupplied - reduce the scholarship further (and perhaps work with other states cooperatively to pick up some of the costs in exchange for some of our oversupply, if it still exists). Students could always choose to continue their own personal preferences - but they'd see the career costs and choice values up front before their education, not after their 3, 4, or more years deep into a field. If a student was still committed to a field, they'd make that choice despite the costs.

"You have students who really have a passion to teach elementary education and you can't sway them from that," said Crystal Walrath, a career development associate at Eastern Michigan University. "But a lot of students who are graduating haven't done enough research to realize that the jobs are not plentiful here in Michigan."

You'd have some students who'd stay with their passion, but at the margins, where it matters, students would have a better idea, through the up front cost of their education, of where the market was.

We could empower (or elect) a body to annually adjust scaling incentives based on models (the difficulty would be keeping politics out of such a body). Even with a merit/field-of-competitiveness sliding scale that reduced amounts in some fields and increase it in others (or for merit), we could still dramatically increase student affordability, and introduce a competitive cost-control element, by utilizing funding portability. And a final twist could be to make some or all of this money available in the form of "forgivable loans," rather than grants, which could be repaid over time simply by staying in the state (one could amortize the tax value of a graduate over time and graduate the forgiveness in that way). It may still be economical for some individuals to move out of state - or simply a personal choice - but in such cases they would then be forced to pay the balance of their loan less the credit for time spent in Michigan. Indeed, this amortization of forgiveness could itself be a cost-saving solution - and it would add state flexibility in making "deals" with other states (student exchange programs, or "negotiating" some compensation from other states in advance in situations like the teacher glut here and shortage in North Carolina - those states with agreements would pay forgiveness costs [or more!], in essence paying for what is now the Michigan-higher-education subsidy)

And if we're educating Michiganders that are to only leave the state for jobs elsewhere, why not lift the artificial self-imposed (as part of an ancient "deal" between U-M and the legislature) "cap" on "out-of-state" students at U-M, which is roughly 30%. Let it be 40 or 50%, or more (I'm still confident enough Michiganders will still qualify on their own merit). Since we don't subsidize out-of-staters at all and in fact charge them "profitable" tuition rates, even if they leave Michigan we're at least not losing the subsidy we'd invest in a Michigander that left, and increasing the odds or base of out-of-staters that might move to Michigan, or at worst visit Michigan for homecoming games or to enjoy our natural wonders that they become familiar with. The problem is that years of politics has "sold" the "cap" to Michigan taxpayers as ensuring that their "subsidy" goes to Michiganders - but its never been true - their subsidy has always been equally spread out throughout the university. Which leads one to ask - why not abandon the subsidy entirely for our flagship university - the University of Michigan (or allow it to be completely portable as described above). With more out-of-state students, and the fact that the legislature's share of U-M's budget has fallen to a mere 10% of U-M's income (the legislature held its end of the bargain though - it averaged 8% growth for a decade but U-M administrative costs averaged 17% growth over the same time, thereby reducing the RELATIVE contribution by half), U-M should be able to easily compensate, and thereby turn the institution into a money-maker for Michigan (such a shift would also allow us to use some unused capacity in our 12 public universities and not have to consider closing a school like Northern Michigan University, which is underutilized). And with higher-standards in admissions, we'd attract even more of the "world's best", perhaps truly rising to a level comparable to Harvard, which is an empty U-M slogan today. Indeed, citizens of Massachusetts are not concerned about, and benefit directly from the, importation of super-talented people attending Harvard. That's a hard political sell - but we're in hard times. I understand this latter point would be more politically difficult and consider it separately.

This combination of proposals would be a powerful set of reforms to our higher education financing structure. They stand here as a challenge.