EDUCATION:
Public Schools Need a Little Peer Pressure*

By Gary S. Becker

Critics of voucher proposals, including President Clinton, believe that increased competition from private schools would hurt public education. Nobel Prize-winner and Hoover fellow Gary S. Becker argues the reverse: Faced with more competition, public schools will get better, not worse.

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Gary S. Becker, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science in 1992, is the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is an expert in human capital, economics of the family, and economic analysis of crime, discrimination, and population. His current research focuses on habits and addictions, formation of preferences, human capital, and population growth. He is a featured monthly columnist for Business Week magazine and is one of the initial fellows of the Society of Labor Economists. In addition to being a Nobel laureate, Becker is a recipient of the 2007 Presidential Medal of Freedom.