I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

Is this not like Ford saying "ICE Vehicles have a long future" - It's clearly bias and its truth has no basis in fact. The "Student Loan" crisis, is a US crisis. Where as the university system is a global one. So you're really saying that the US will stop doing Higher Education, while the rest of the world continues? That feels like a bad move.

Is the problem with the US College system an educational one or a financial one? Seems like the latter, which means the solution isn't to stop the former.

When the pool of qualified applicants is 3x your available positions, it seems to make sense to me to attempt to match the population makeup of the United States at large when selecting from that pool, since otherwise you're more or less going to do it randomly.

Helping one group of people does not mean hurting another group of people; life is not zero sum, and pretending like getting admitted to Harvard or not is the only metric in this conversation is ridiculous. There are approximately zero children, Asian or otherwise, whose only shot is to get into Harvard or not go to college at all.

Being denied admission to Harvard due to a luck-of-the-draw is not discrimination, it's a lottery. Sam Altman may have a larger point, but the Harvard discrimination case is not an argument that supports that point.

> If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years

Is the heart of the problem. For a long time, this was basically the core function of universities - to make people part of the elite. We told ourselves that it was actually about the things being taught rather than social connections. Maybe to a certain extent it even was.

But then, operating on that assumption, we say, what gives these people the right to be elites? Let's make it more accessible! Send anyone who's smart enough and can afford it to school.

We do that. And many of them do go on to get better and higher-paying jobs. To some extent, society creates more jobs for them to do, and to some extent, existing jobs get education inflation, requiring advanced degrees for no real reason.

But why stop there? This is biased against the people who can't afford it. Let's create a ton of scholarships and student loan programs to make it more affordable so more people go. This kind of works, and kind of increases the prices even more (due to bad design of the loan system) and increases education inflation some too.

We've already made it so attractive, might as well tell all high school students that they're failures if they don't go to college, even if it really isn't for them. Tell 'em that so hard that the blue-collar jobs we do still need start to have trouble getting employees and sometimes actually increase in wage past the point of some degree-requiring jobs.

The way the whole financing of the system works makes the whole thing a huge money-pit too, which helps it keep absorbing more functions.

It sure feels like the whole system has gone crazy and needs some major reworking. I'm not sure what the new healthier system would look like or how we transition to it, but something needs to happen. Sorry, not everyone can be the elite. We should stop telling people that they're a failure in life if they don't join the elite and stop making them perform signs of elite status, like degrees at high-ranked universities, to get jobs that ultimately aren't all that important.