How America's universities became debt factories

But…the whole point is that it is NOT a market. If student debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are “solved”.

Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. Universities that provide a poor ROI will shut down. Universities will need to reduce costs for traditional coursework, cut courses with poor returns, add courses with higher returns.

The inflation in higher education that has run rampant due to subsidized demand being removed.

And some jobs do. As I've noted elsewhere if you want to go into Big Law, you go to a relative handful of law schools, which are heavily fed by undergrad Ivies, and clerk at a high federal level.

It's bizarre to me how accepting we are of the idea that higher education should cost anything let alone be mind-bogglingly expensive. This is wildly successful propaganda. Student loan debt was an explicit political goal [1]:

> "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat," announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970. Freeman, an economics professor at Stanford, was also an advisor to President Richard Nixon.

> "We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher education]," Freeman added.

Poverty is intentional and a necessary condition for capitalism. It creates a malleable and compliant labor force. Student debt, medical debt, housing debt. All of it only exists to make a handful of extremely wealthy people slightly more wealthy.

Modern universities aren't really about education at all. They're simply hedge funds in a trenchcoat.

Harvard, for example, makes what? Half a billion in tuition per year? But they have upwards of $50 billion in their endowment. The interest alone could fund the entire university.

[1]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educate...

I don't know if this is some kind of heresy, but here we go.

I don't think universities provide much value at all to the common student who is not going to be a PhD.

I went to a very well-known institution known for putting the students in a room with the professors, maybe two or three students, to one professor. My economics professor taught me one on one.

I still think, in the end, the work is mostly done alone, in a pile of books, on your own time.

Not with other students, and not in lectures, and not in tutorials.

This is a bit different from school where you can actually learn the material in class because, let's face it, school doesn't have a very deep curriculum.

So at university my impression is that they mainly tell you what to go and read about, and then you read about it yourself. The tutor is there to course correct you a bit, but they aren't going to do much other than save you a bit of time learning the orthodoxy of your subject. The lectures are a table of contents. At most, it's really just a guy telling you that you should know what an eigenvalue is, or you should have read about the ISLM model, and so on. For you to actually understand something, well, you have to have spent a lot of time in the books rearranging your mind.

Given that this is what you actually do at university, why have it this way?

Make an examination authority. "Here is the national linear algebra test. Anyone who wants to try it, sign up, and come to this hall on this date." Everyone who passes, whether they studied at home or went to fancy U, gets a paper that says they passed it. Do it as a 12 year old prodigy or a 75 year old grandma, you get a diploma.

Now, maybe there is already an authority that does this, I don't know. But it isn't very well known or authoritative.

The current incumbents are gatekeepers. Everybody thinks that smart kids go to the most prestigious universities, and that includes employers. It's a Schelling point that doesn't need to be there, and it allows the universities to extract a great deal of value from the kids.

If you made this authority of examinations, many people could learn the material and show their competence without incurring huge costs.

People could start working earlier. You could separate the coming-of-age experience from academic learning. Poor people could participate more.

Socialism is a term too broad to mean anything. When we say socialism, do we include states that provide healthcare systems as infrastructure, as is common across the world? Do we include the vast amounts of market interference represented by decisions about what crimes can be hidden behind a corporate veil, what companies win lucrative government contracts to have decades of non-competitive profits?

The attitude that the government shouldn't intervene against companies on the behalf of human rights has been tried for fifty years, and it is an unprecedented failure even in financial terms for at least roughly 80% of the population of one of the largest and wealthiest countries in the world in terms of real purchasing power. Even for many of us in higher income brackets, the resulting crumbling infrastructure and drastic wealth disparities leave much to be desired as a society to live in. Many of these problems have solutions, and calling them "socialism" is meaningless as an argument against them