The late Elinor Ostrom taught us many useful things, including how to analyze complex situations rigorously to reveal ways to improve them. Instead of reacting to the world with anger and confusion, someone who has learned from Ostrom can break down a problem and look for remedies.

I am teaching her work this week to undergraduates, and separately discussing the application of her framework to energy policy with colleagues in engineering. If you happen to want a primer to Ostrom, I have recorded lectures about her basic ideas (Part I, 17 minutes) and their application (Part II , 1 minutes).

To develop the mental habit of analysis, our students and I considered Ostrom’s framework for goods (things of value to anyone). We used her framework to model the situation in which we found ourselves, a classroom at Tufts University.

As shown in the graphic that accompanies this post, Ostrom divided all goods in two ways. Some goods are subtractable, meaning that they can be used up or ruined. But others are not. And some are excludable, meaning that it is possible to prevent individuals from using them. But again, others are not. These two distinctions create four categories.

In a college classroom, the private goods include the students’ property, such as their phones (neatly out of sight in our case) and their clothes. One student pointed out that a chair in the classroom, although legally the property of Tufts, functions as a private good during class because of an effective norm that you can’t take someone’s chair away.

Knowledge can be a pure public good. If I explain Ostrom’s theories, that doesn’t subtract or detract from them. And it is hard to block people from learning about her thought once it’s published.

Tufts is a club good, meaning that students benefit by virtue of being admitted to it. Other students do not detract from the benefits of enrolling, except that a very large student body would begin to dilute the “brand.” Yet it is easy to exclude individuals through the admissions process. I suppose that a diploma is a private good, as are the credits that add up to a degree. But the value of a degree depends on its indicating a club good that is owned by all alumni.

Finally, the learning environment is what Ostrom called a “common pool resource” or “commons,” for short. It is subtractable in the sense that a student (or a professor) can make it worse by acting badly or even by taking space in a classroom without contributing much. However, the learning environment is not very excludable, because it will benefit everyone who is present and wants to take advantage of it.

For me, the interesting question in an institution like mine is the relationship between the commons and the club goods.

Our business model depends on selling a club good. This is not true in other countries with different educational systems, or at least it is less important there. But institutions like Tufts cannot survive financially without charging people to join an exclusive club.

Perhaps it is good for the world that American colleges and universities provide club goods by selecting and labeling their students. For one thing, many people appreciate the club that is their own alma mater. And arguably, the sorting function sends useful signals, transmitting information about people who have graduated from Chicago or Oberlin or Vanderbilt. However, on the whole, I think the competition to generate club goods does harm. It sorts and separates young people, reinforces prior inequalities, and allows colleges to compete for exclusivity instead of offering educational value.

An institution’s value (in the more idealistic sense of that word) involves the commons that we create in which our people learn, grow, and form a community.

Thus we can measure our excellence by the degree to which we leverage our club goods for the commons, or (put another way) how we minimize the exclusivity of our club while maximizing the common-pool resource that we create here.

The cynical take on US higher education says that it maximizes its club goods and uses the commons (i.e., the learning environment) mostly for branding. Frank Bruni satirized that situation in a memorable 2016 piece in which he imagined that Stanford had finally reached the ultimate success, a zero percent admission rate. He wrote:

At first blush, Stanford’s decision would seem to jeopardize its fund-raising. … But over recent years, Stanford administrators noticed that as the school rejected more and more comers, it received bigger and bigger donations, its endowment rising in tandem with its exclusivity, its luster a magnet for Silicon Valley lucre.

In fact just 12 hours after the university’s rejection of all comers, an alumnus stepped forward with a financial gift prodigious enough for Stanford to begin construction on its long-planned Center for Social Justice, a first-ever collaboration of Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava, who also designed the pedestrian bridge that will connect it to the student napping meadows.

But real universities (including Stanford) actually create learning environments for those who get in; they don’t merely issue diplomas to those whom they admit.

A university also generates important pure public goods, new knowledge and culture that disseminate globally. And it can even offer worthwhile private goods, like t-shirts and dorm rooms. But I would focus on the degree to which an institution deploys the resources from its club goods to provide common-pool resources. The more of that, the better.

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See also: why don’t colleges allocate more resources to access?; the weirdness of the higher ed marketplace, etc.