Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

I wonder why one would want to "disrupt* [XYZ] in general, and education in particular. Disruption seems to me to almost always being a net negative for everyone except the upstarts who displaced the incumbents by literally breaking their market - particularly, the customers end up holding the short end of the stick.

> Ultimately technology won't "fix" the higher education system, but simply make it less relevant in the practical world.

That is how technology works, which is why I don't like the whole "you can't fix a social problem with technology" line. You absolutely can. It's usually the only way you can fix it. And most of the time, the fix doesn't address the problem directly, just makes it go away by restructuring incentives that lead to it in the first place.

Thus, my belief is that the answer to "why hasn't technology disrupted [XYZ]" is that the technology the asker has in mind barks up the wrong tree. The [XYZ] in question isn't a fixed artifact you can sculpt, but an equilibrium of economic and social incentives. It's dynamically maintained, so pushing directly against it means you'll be pushed back at. You can make a small dent somewhere, then you run out of money or will, and status quo resumes.

EDIT:

Or, if you have access to billions of dollars of VC money, you can try and do it the hard way, to detonate a metaphorical nuke in a valley to reshape it completely. Maybe you'll succeed, but more likely, you'll just starve every established company/institution to death, and then still run out of money, leaving just a completely broken [XYZ]. See my previous point about disruption not being all that positive. It's what's currently happening in food delivery and private transportation, as restaurants and taxi companies are being outcompeted by unsustainable corporations operating at a loss.

We've figured out how to increase physical goods and enable efficient use of scarce resources that can't be infinitely replicated incredibly well, despite a huge range of different emotions, motivations, and conflicts about how those physical resources should be allocated. I'd argue that's mostly because signals related to physical goods are relatively clear, direct, and measurable.

Things like "knowledge" and "skill training" aren't as clear, direct, and measurable, and when you walk up the hierarchy of abstraction, it's a lot more fuzzy and difficult to measure what you're actually getting as a consumer, what you're delivering as a producer, and what the source of problems are, especially if there's a major time delay and variability for payoff. That's the case with modern education, and also applies to "investment payoff in quality and effectiveness of health care", "investment payoff in quality and effectiveness of living space", "investment payoff in quality and effectiveness of public outreach", etc. It makes proper negotiation very difficult and leaves a lot of room for confusion and abuse.

One possible solution to this, which seems impossible/idk how this would work in the modern era, is to try to return to a system where a whole town would work more like a single unit so as to try to reduce some of the sprawl and complexity. Earlier in America there'd be a town known for making shoes, a town known for making lightbulbs, a town known for making steel, etc. There'd be a rallying, measurable "physical thing" the town could help use to calibrate whether it's healthy/allocating resources correctly. If the town isn't working as a cohesive unit, the central "thing", like lightbulbs, would get measurably worse. High school education is bad? Fewer competent lightbulb workers, fewer lightbulbs produced, clear signal. Healthcare isn't working? More sick days, lower moral, fewer lightbulbs produced, clear signal. Everyone in the town would have a better map of the intricacies of what's working and not working in that smaller system than they could possibly have in a global/gargantuan system, and they'd have a relatively objective measuring stick to determine whether they're working effectively as a unit.

There's plenty of "customers" (students) who wind up holding the short end of the current stick, too. People who, say, wind up $50,000 in debt, and still didn't manage to get a degree. Or people who wind up $50,000 in debt and graduate, but with a degree that isn't worth that. Or even people who get a worthwhile degree, but still wind up $50,000 in debt.

> That is how technology works, which is why I don't like the whole "you can't fix a social problem with technology" line. You absolutely can. It's usually the only way you can fix it.

Yes and no. You can maybe stop your gullible grandmother from getting so many scam phone calls with SHAKEN/STIR. You can't stop her next-door neighbor from pulling her into a multi-level marketing deal, though. SHAKEN/STIR may stop (most) scam phone calls, but it doesn't fix the gullibility at all.

A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree. A doctorate is more like a title rather than a degree, and if you do it full-time early in your career, it signifies that you can advance from junior to intermediate positions.

Or they could mean something else, depending on which traditions you are used to.