In Papua New Guinea, a university education has a price like any other good or service, and I quote James Carville, (March 22, 2016) on twitter that "It is a barrel of oil, its an ounce of gold, a tonne of fish, a cubic tonne of logs, its a stock". Government own and run Papua New Guinea Higher Education institutional budgets have been getting cuts for the last five years since 2012 to date. This is a cause of concern. However, the causal effect may be a result of an ideological shift in higher education.
Higher education is a producer of 'goods' (that is, the graduates) that will be consumed later by the entrepreneurial, professional and employment industry. Regarding the taxpayers' support to higher education: please see the first link below. Regarding the shift in higher education (in order to produce 'quality goods'): please see the second link.
http://www.sonecon.com/docs/studies/Report_on_Taxpayer_Costs_for_Higher_Education-Shapiro-Pham_Sept_2010.pdf
Article A Paradigm Shift to Outcomes-Based Higher Education: Policie...
What kind of a good is higher education and what should tax payers be expected to support?
To me the right higher education is a kind of good worth investing for ourselves or for our children as its Return of Investment (ROI) is always appreciating similarly like buying a piece of property in a strategic location whereby its market value / price will continuously increasing. Think tax payers only pay certain amount of tax according to their earning brackets but it is up to government's wisdom how much budget to be allocated for high education which can vary from country to country.
In most places, there is a positive correlation between the level of education and income of a family. It is so in my country, perhaps even more obvious in US.
"...the gap between the wages of a family of two college graduates and a family of high school graduates. Between 1979 and 2012, that gap grew by some $30,000, after inflation. This clever calculation by Lawrence Katz, a labor economist from Harvard, amounts to a powerful counterargument to anybody who doubts the importance of education in the battle against the nation’s entrenched inequality."
(Recently the national budget for education was reduced, as compared to past years. We are badly affected by low oil prices. And most of us pay back a month's salary as income tax.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/business/economy/a-simple-equation-more-education-more-income.html?_r=0
All civilizations developed with the creation of knowledge. That knowledge had to be "stored" and passed onto the next generations. Libraries, monasteries, and what later became known as "universities" played that role. A society cannot develop (and I am not only referring to economic development) without a strong, pertinent, and constantly evolving higher education system.
Some countries allocate financial resources to higher education institutions in many different ways. Some have all-public, state-run universities, some are free, some receivve partial funding, and the other part is paid by the students and their families. Some have public and private institutions, and some subsidize private colleges.
Independently of the modality of funding, there is no doubt that higher education MUST BE one of the sectors in which the governement of any modern country would have an interest. Whether is is through public policy, taxes, or any other kind of promotion.
Great answers ladies and gentlemen, But what about the second part of the question? "What should tax payers be expected to support" with regard to higher education in Papua New Guinea when we are already being demonised by the progressive taxation system and we are paying for Tuition Fee Free (TFF) education from K-12 and we still have to pay for HE?
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