Why education and health are more different than alike

Abstract

Education and health – or more precisely, schooling and health care – are often lumped together as the major components of something called “the social sector”. There are some important similarities, but they are outweighed by greater and more significant differences. Most of these differences are intrinsic to knowledge and learning or to disease and dealing with it. Other distinctions arise from how society organizes and pays for schooling and medical care. The differences matter for costs, day-to-day management, and reform efforts in each sector. Treating the two sectors as highly comparable is both sloppy thinking and conducive to bad public policy.