[joe_the_user]

Even if you dislike markets as a mechanism, education is very tricky because it's very very expensive, and prone to important moral hazards when it's free.

Education is not inherently expensive. The student loan mechanisms are what allowed the vast expansion of colleges as capital intensive enterprises. You can find a multitude of discussion about how cheap both public and private education was in, say, the 1960s. And that was with primarily state/institutional regulation. Which is to say the student loans were moral hazard crack to compared to state regulation.

For most subjects, one needs an informed teacher, a class room and some books. Somehow this costs vast sums now. Guess why?

[novariation]

I'm using french costs, these are paid 90% by the government ! The underlying issue does not disappear.

[novariation]

More details: You need practicing, so you need experiments/computers/supplies/projects — this is true both in engineering and art school, any time you do anything that's not completely pen and paper.

You also need to divert time from your researchers to teaching activities. You need to pay for classrooms, that's real estate, plumbing, electricity, etc.

Keeping up with the state of the art in research isn't cheap, and using part of those funds to purely teach and not compete with other countries is an investment that's not neutral.