This also has the added benefit of screwing with the Gini coefficient as returns to capital are always compounded where worker productivity at best goes up linearly.
So people mortgage their future in a bad Nash equilibrium in a competition to increase their productivity at a slightly faster linear rate than other workers, by taking money from financiers. The same financiers that see an exponential return and are incentivized to shrink labor costs to keep maximizing compound returns. So students are stuck in a system in which they're borrowing from their ideological competition.
It's not that universities are inherently evil or administrators are bad. It's a natural extension of how returns to investment work.
Now I'm not a Marxist, but that's the way the math works. The only solution I can see is a social system in which the wealthy form investment vehicles that run as cooperatives owned by the workers and flatten the Gini coefficient as much as possible. If students bought shares in a university that they then owned for life similar to bonds, then the university system itself would self correct.
Say you go to graduate school or had tenure - then you would have a higher share of bonds. You would no longer be paid in a linear way, but a compound one. If the returns didn't align with expected earnings the university would fail. Linear payments are essentially just an admittance of failure to believe that inflation won't destroy someone's earning potential unless they're able to become a shareholder faster than someone else. Which causes intergenerational disequilibria as we've seen where the old are incredibly wealthy and the young are too poor to start families.
Unless economics is willing to confront the social problem of compound interest in a finite world accelerationist capitalism will end up destroying society.
No, the solution is not to burn down academia. Ask the Cambodians how killing everyone with glasses worked out for them.