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Abstract
One hundred and fifty years ago, the 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act was signed into law.Wise
people at that time recognized that the private market for education failed to produce an
efficient level of education decades before the economic theory was developed to explain that
market failures reduce efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to review the history of selected
events that resulted in the development of publicly funded U.S. educational institutions
and to issue a challenge for our profession to do a better job of educating about the theoretical
justification for using tax dollars to support university education and agricultural research and
the efficiency enhancing consequences of that use.