[lumost]

Is the suggestion then that we need fewer teachers in order for the price of teaching labor to rise above costco? or that we need teachers to provide more economic value from their teaching labor? How do we measure economic production from teaching labor?

[monero-xmr]

Why do you think teaching at a university is better than working at Costco? How do you decide the optimal number of university teachers vs. optimal number of Costco employees without the market test?

I don't have any emotional attachment to university teachers anymore than I have emotional attachment to buggy whip makers. Maybe a lot of the knowledge a university education provided can be obtained by moving to a major city and watching various Youtube documentaries for 4 years, augmented with debating people in Hacker News comments.

If your goal in life is to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled in purpose, hasn't universal university education been a recent phenomena, not required to fulfil one's life goals? Perhaps university life and its requisite bureaucracy is an aberration, not a requirement for human flourishing.

[kupfer]

The professors I know are experts in their small domain (and most of them are really smart, but this is not my point here). They know all the nitty details, I am always amazed by their wide knowledge in discussions. I think for a society it is easily worth it to pay people to dig so deep into their field of interest and the market is not the right mechanism to enable that. I also think Youtube is nice to get started, but I found it insufficient for graduate level material.