| Ok, maybe college is typically "worth it" in the sense of typically paying for itself. But ... costs for American schools have gotten a bit out of control, and I think it's entirely appropriate to view them critically, ask what their purpose is, and how they can achieve that purpose more efficiently. - colleges and universities have seen a large increase in the number of administrators, over a period of decades - simultaneously, an increasing share of instruction is shifted to adjuncts - we're now at the point where a year of private school tuition is less than the salary of an adjunct professor in many cases So while students are paying more for education, they're getting less (or at least less instruction from actual faculty). If the point of colleges is education, I think we should begin tracking the fraction of schools' budgets which go to teaching costs (faculty who actually teach, facilities costs for instruction buildings) vs everything else, and only institutions that spend more than k% of their budget on teaching should be eligible for loans and grants. k can be brought down over time. As a very distant alternative, perhaps we're now at the point where we should offer a way to track, recognize and acknowledge work done with a private instructor. Suppose we normalized the practice of one to five students pooling funds to hire a different instructor every semester for intensive and personalized instruction with virtually no administration costs, or a small pool of instructors convening a short-lived "school" on a topic. If we were willing to recognize students demonstrating the same amount of proficiency in their chosen area gained outside of a "college", perhaps we could strip away the less useful parts of colleges as institutions. |