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

This is a great little insight, well put, and in fact you are understating the scope of the problem.

The impact of this issue is, if anything, greater on the cost of research than it is on the cost of an education. A major academic institution is the single most expensive place you could do research - because everything costs much more than it should, the headcount on any project is stratospheric, and everything moves so slowly that you pay much more for each "head" than you ought to. That has downstream affects that kneecap every industry reliant on academic research, from industrial and military competitiveness to medicine. It's also why there has been interest for decades, and seems to be increasing interest now, in private research lab investment from large philanthropists - it is legitimately cheaper and faster to pull a Paul Allen and stand up a new research lab from scratch than it is to get the same research done through traditional academic means.

Scott Galloway (who I know is somebody everybody has an opinion about now) has scoped this problem really well, though I've been much less impressed experientially with his solution (Section4). You're spot-on - if we optimized for creating productive members of society (bullet #2) and preparing individuals for financial independence and productivity (bullet #1) individually - or even just ceded #2 temporarily (which is a role, arguably, existing colleges are failing at anyway) and optimized toward #1 - it could be done much more cheaply than it is being done today. NOT through any kind of high-minded shift in how education is done, as education, in the sense of a teacher-in-a-classroom-teaching-students-supported-by-TAs, is not broken, and has worked for centuries. But college today is like a really bad cable bill, where the vast majority of users are paying for one thing (ESPN), but have their cost burdened by 90% of the package being a required purchase that they don't want. (All the other channels)

Other dimensions of the problem better support disruption, but most directly, your point would be well addressed by colleges simply reducing overservice. Of course, that implies gargantuan changes to the structure of these institutions, which will be wildly uncomfortable for a lot of individuals who are currently supported by them.

These rates are negotiated with the government, and aren't exceeding the actual costs. Indeed, someone I know crunched the numbers for my institution, and the "margin" is exceedingly tight, and for some projects, negative.

I am faculty, and while yes, we are incentivized to bring in money, we also have output too. And believe me, when talking to funders, "gee, I didn't do any work because I was bringing in more grants" is a pretty dangerous strategy.

Indirects also cover important things. On my current grants, the following are covered by indirect costs, just as examples.

- The data center and networking infrastructure where my particular nodes on our cluster live.

- My actual office, including things like the facilities folks that keep it clean, lighting and heating, IT infrastructure again, as well as things like paper for the printer because I prefer to read on actual paper.

- The library and journal subscriptions that provide me the material I actually need to read.

- The admins who are helping shepherd a position I'm hiring for through the process of doing that, posting the position descriptions on the relevant sites, etc. The one who put in a bunch of orders for me for an international project where it's cheaper to buy the stuff here, set it up, and then carry it with me than it is to get it there. The one who knows the reporting requirements I don't. The IRB admin who helped us figure out some human subjects issues around doing research that involves university employees in their capacity as employees. The admin that helped me actually prepare and submit the proposal.

- The attorney that helped review and sort out several fairly complex agreements, as well as a whole host of fairly simple ones that still needed to be checked.

- The senior level administrator (the usual boogeyman in these things) who is spearheading an effort to consolidate several of individual-level efforts into something that's coherent at the university level, so we can actually act on things that don't require individual-level researchers like me to have the bandwidth to keep a relationship alive, and which persists past turnover either at the university or the organizations we are working with.

- The startup funding for a new disease ecologist before I can put them on some new grants.

All of these help propel my research forward. My indirects pay for my share of these people's time and expertise. And importantly, they help cover things that I can't foresee, or are enough layers of removed from me that I don't even really know who we're paying as much as "This thing gets done".

Is there waste in our indirects? Sure. There's waste everywhere. But it's both hardly the terribly oppressive burden HN seems to think it is (even leaving aside that HN consistently does the math wrong) and something that exists in industry as well - it's just hidden in the total price.

Incidentally, my institution is also perfectly happy to just quote folks a fully burdened price.

What happens when we don't charge full indirect costs?

The taxpayers of my state end up making up the difference, because the lights, and the reporting bits, and the IRB, etc. still have to exist to get the work done. And for some projects one might be able to justify that, but for some others (waves at industry) I have a problem with it.

Interesting; I have never heard the term Primarily Undergraduate Institutions, although it's clearly an established term. During my PhD program, when folks were on the job market, we called them "teaching colleges." Most people - rightly! - associate "teaching colleges" with colleges that train teachers, but in our context, we knew immediately what people meant: colleges where professors were expected to spend most of their time actually teaching with little to no research expectations.

I think GPs perspective is not wrong, but assumes (or maybe hopes) that students are at least considering graduate+ level education. like you suggest, I think this is mostly not true of undergrad cs students. if you have no intention of going to grad school, industry internships are a much better use of time outside of class. as a bonus, the internship is a lot more likely to pay enough that you can actually pay bills while in school.

OK but presumably Howard Hughes built his empire while he was not yet crazy and incapable, so it is not a good example for what you wanted to say.